I have a big landscape which will be rendered in "sections".

How do I make the sun shine even over the whole landscape and stay that way when I move the camera and render a section?
As it is now the sun alwys shines brighter in the center of the scene. See image.

I can not render the whole landscape in one go because the angles will be wrong at the edges.

Image to illustrate the difference in lights when putting the images together.

When i understand it right you simply need to switch off the "point to camera" option in the sun settings. Sselect the sun and look in the upper right little options window.

One day your ship comes in - but you're at the airport.

It is off.
I have tried many combinations. It is probably suppose to behave like this to give the 3D effect. But it would be good if didn't center the sunlight on every part render.

So far I have adjusted it in Photoshop.

I think that, when you move the camera, this changes many things for the rays of renderer (reflexion angles),
so I fear that doing this way,
the different renders never will match.

Can't you backstep the camera, so that entire the scene holds in one sole view at a long focal (so the angular "errors" in the corners lessen),
and chose a wide landscape format (render partial areas of that, if necessary) ?
Lights should be ok, then.

---

VueInfinite's world is not so infinite.
I don't know the exact limits, but using Vue's units as millimeters, when creating a scene miles wide,
can make my far-away cam "fall over the border of the universe", go blank.

Sometimes, I get such phenomena from about 21000 units up.
When this happens, I prefer to scale down the whole thing, but that means to adjust many of the materials.

((I just tried another one, to "enlarge universe" : create an ordinary plane, put it down below the soil so it won't show, and give it a size which goes from the scene to the camera position. This seems to help Vue to get calculus ok on greater distances.
But when going out very far this way, my main camera view won't show anything.
Rendering seems to work, and the small preview on the right side shows what's going on, but main cam view shows none of the objects.
Not a handy solution, and gets lost in space at about 150 000 units of distance, too,
so I'd prefer downscale the whole thing, for to stay inside Vue's ordinary range of numbers))
((Using Vue5Inf))

Have you tried substituting your own light source(s) for the default "sun"? Just an idea, have never tried it, but maybe several "Distant Light" (collimated) light sources, evenly distributed above your scene, and each pointing straight down, would even things up?

This might mess up shadows, but for such a distant viewpoint that may not matter?

Vue does a good enough job of simulating real lighting that one can often try things in a way similar to real world lighting. For example, you could have several light sources above a horizontal "light diffuser" which would be a large plane with a "light gel" material. Or maybe a high altitude fog/haze atmosphere would even up the light?

I have put in a feature request at e-on to make it possible for any object to be made into a light source - giving the ability for a large plane to give off very even illumination (very usful for invisible interior ceiling lighting, etc.). They were not optimistic about doing this, as it would require large render times.

_jc
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Message edited on: 12/28/2005 12:31

Did you know that you can render the "top" view pane? Perhaps you can cobble together a solution from that. Use the little camera icon in the top-right of the "top" pane, and it will render. It won't render to window, render to disc or even render in single-pane view mode, but you can resize it to occupy most of the screen.

Have you tried setting up the camera to capture whole scene and then using "Render Area" to split it up into segments without changing anything else in the scene? Above image, one render was a single 4000 pixel wide pass. Other was 4 x 1000 pixel wide "Render Area" strips. Which is which?

Mark

Tiny wrote: "I can not render the whole landscape in one go because the angles will be wrong at the edges."

Oops! missed that bit.

Mark

Reflectance is relative to angle for almost all surfaces (in real life anyway). So for any surface with any amount of reflectivity you will always see different amounts of reflected light depending on your angle of view, which will change across a camera lens for example. So, with a single light source, you will always have a varying amount of light across your scene simply due to angle of reflectance. You could try remedying that with several light sources to get a more flat lighting setup. Using an Orthographic Camera might be another solution. Not sure if Vue has such an option, but the top-down camera might be in orthographic mode. - Oshyan