Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=284480

Hi there, well, thanks to Guitta for getting me started on my first full-fledged tutorial for Vue. ;) The thing should be done by next week, but I'm asking for suggestions about how "far" I should go with it. The scope of the tutorial as planned will be to give beginners and intermediate users an idea what to look for when lighting an indoor scene. I might also scratch the surface about how to simulate radiosity lighting in Vue d'Esprit (see the attached image). At any rate, if anybody can give me some hints about how "much" should go into a tutorial, please comment here. I personally prefer short tutorials, but as I'm writing the thing mainly for you guys here, I figure I should ask about how expansive you'd prefer it. ;) For Illustration, check out the image under the attached link. Thanks for reading, -Sascha.rb

For comparison: the original scene with "standard" lighting. And yes, it uses the same textures as the one above. ;) ta, -Sascha.rb

That will be a very nice tutorial : put ambient light setting to a very small amount... I'm interested to read your tutorial ; how do you deal with the light replacing ambient? ;=) I didn't know someone was interested by this kind of stuff among Vue user. Recently I posted a thread here, but I made a big mistake, saying "put ambient to maximum" ; hehehe ! Always learning and learning, experiment after experiment, but never satisfied with results concerning the light ;=) Yves

Hi Yves, Well, why did I just know you'd post? ;) There really seem to be few people who are "fanatic" about lighting, which I think is a shame. I just love to play around with lighting very simple sets, IMO that's what makes or breaks a good image. Ambient light is evil. :D On the other hand side, the "final" render above still uses about 50% ambient lighting, the trick is not to forget when you can still use ambient light, and that you can use different colours as well. ;) I'll wrap up the tutorial next Friday. I think I'll make it two-part, i.e. short basic introduction as an "awareness" riser, and then some advanced stuff. Thanks for your feedback! -Sascha.rb

I'm interested in lighting too, and look forward to the rest of your tutorial. I've been experimenting with the atmosphere, particularly the effect of ambient vs sunlight, but haven't really worked on any interior lighting, so I find your information very interesting. Thanks for putting the tutorial together.

I think you should explain exactly how you made the light for your image with the 2 glasses in doing screenshots to show evolution before-->after.

Nice tutorial it will be ! I agree that ambient light must be avoided. I can' wait to see your tut. One problem with the light is there is no universal solution ; indoor scenes are more easy to light than outdoors. And among indoor scenes, single objects are really easy to light; perfection can be obtained in such cases (Sascha your glass picture was probably near perfection). But for an interior with lot of objects, the problem becomes harder. I made a lot of tests during the past weeks, and tried several possibilities, most of them for single objects : - 1,2,...spotlights around a group of objects - lot of pointlights (up to > 100 but this one was in preview mode) In most of the cases I used soften settings for the light but in that case we are obliged to render in high quality so, even with a simple scene, rendering time is >10h There are several way to place the lights (spheric dome , plane, line,...). It depends of the scene itself, of course. Generally Sure, 2 pictures, one with lot of ambient, one with your special (and good) settings, should be a very convincing test. Hope to continue such interesting exchanges ;=) Yves

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=284037

Hi Yves, why, thank you for the praise. ;) I'll have to hand it back to you, mind--your renders are the reason I actually started fooling around with lighting in Vue. Until I stumbled over your gallery some months ago, I was like most people, bitching about lack of radiosity and GI in Vue d'Esprit. When I saw what you got out of Vue2.1, I was determined to give it a shot. So, eh, thank you. :) Lighting-wise, I hardly ever use point lights. Spot lights give you far more control over the lighting, I feel. If I use point lights, it's either to simulate sunlight, or to use as ersatz-ambience lights. For indoor lighting, I found the best approach to go the traditional three-point route, i.e. fix light, fill lights, back lights. I don't use back lights all too much as Vue's renderer doesn't cope with it very well unless you combine it with a glow material which somewhat destroys the purpose of realistic lighting. ;) A technique I found very successful was introducing coloured bounce lights and tuning down the fill lights. I'll probably make a separate tut about bounce lights and simulating radiosity in Vue. As it looks now, I will make the first tutorial about the "glasses" image (see link) as a couple of people asked for more information about it. This will lead nicely over to a later radiosity tutorial as this image already uses two bounce lights. ;) ta, -Sascha.rb P.S. Yves, you should consider upgrading to Vue4.1 . . . the renderer is quite considerably faster than in Vue2.1 ;) -.rb

I'm not at all a specialist of "how to simulate radiosity", but I saw in a magazine some month ago a technique consisting (exactly as you are saying) to add some colored lights (sometimes some negative lights) in some strategic points (the subject of the article was a very simple still life study, with two single objects, a ball above a piece of satin). I have not tried this precise technique in Vue, since placing several lights in a scene can gives some impressive results. But I'm more and more interested by your work, and have lot of things to learn from you, it seems. Thanks for Vue4.1 upgrading suggestion : if 4.1 is faster than 2.1, that's an other reason to upgrade. May I ask some questions ? You are speaking of "fill light" : it seems to be a Vue4 feature with volumetric atmosphere,isn't it ? I was very impressed by your "glass picture", and the glass reflection/ higlight were so perfect, that I guess what is the number of polygons you have used for each glass. I alway add some breaklines due to the relatively coarse mesh in my glass pictures ;=) Yves

That's funny--I've made a "radiosity" study yesterday night using a white ball on a piece of cloth. :D seems to be a popular concept. fill lights have nothing to do with Vue, specifically. :) "fill lights" are the second tier of the three-point lighting approach. The "fix" light (first tier) is the main lightsource which illuminates the focus of your image, produces the "natural" shadows etc.. If you don't use ambient lighting, this of course results in rather dark images with a high exposure / contrast. Say, a pot lighted by one spotlight will have a very bright spot or specular, but almost black shading at the back. To make "lost" detail visible, you add more lights, the "fill lights" or secondary light sources (second tier). Fill lights usually are a lot less intense than the fix light--average ration would be 1:4--simply because they are not supposed to really light the scene, but to provide additional shading. In the "glass" picture, I used 6 spotlights as fill lights to lighten up the room some, and "chisel" the shadows as well as the contours of the glasses. I'll provide seperate screenshots with only fix lights, fill lights, and bounce lights in the tut. You're right about the polygon count on those glasses. Each glass consists of just about 10,000 polygons. In wireframe mode, you can hardly make out the individual triangles. ;) Eats up memory like mad, but is well worth the effort, I'd say. ta, -Sascha.rb

Thanks to share this infos on lighting. Maybe they are basics artistic principle, but in fact I don't know them. Although of course I used them in all of my pictures, I would say. Now I'm waiting for your tutorials, ;=) Yves

Regarding Fix / Fill / Bounce lights, I concoted a quick comparison image. (1) uses only the primary light source. Mark how dark the right side of the sphere appears, and how much depth is missing from the image. (2) added one dimm fill light (a spot light) to add definition to the right side of the sphere. Much better than just cranking up ambient light. Still, the sphere looks somewhat "added" and not part of the scene. (3) uses three coloured bounce lights, in addition to the fix and fill lights. I exaggerated the light strength to show the point. ;) Now, the sphere integrates far better with the scene. ta, -Sascha.rb

That's an interesting test. I like this type of theoritical study (applicable for still life scenes with few objects). At this time my problem is that I have lots of black shadows (as you show on the 2 pictures above), even if I use lot of lights. In Vue 2.1 it's not easy to overcome this problem. There are no quadratic light, each light will produce shadows,... Most of the time these black shadows appear in the wall corners ;=) Yves