I really need to learn how to set up lights in my Bryce scenes and I don't seem to be having much luck in finding good, simple tutorials. Do any of you have any favorites, hints, tips, etc?

Well Sihn, can we take a specific image you are trying to create and then see how we can go around using the various lights or in how many ways you can light them up? Not sure of what good tutorial sites are there as I generally do most of my own lighting. Do let me know if I can help.

You may want to consider looking for photography tutes. They tend to tell you how to light an object. That will help you with positioning. As for the rest of the light lab, that's a whole book right there. It's very subjective. How do you want your lights to be? I can offer a few tips though. If you are using spotlights, you can set them to track the object that you are lighting. (Buy clicking the "tracking" icon and dragging it to the object you want to light up) That will keep the light pointed at the object even if you move the object or the light. Also, I don't know if you can set the ambient shadow color in B4 (I don't think you can) but a good tip is that light casts shadows that are the complimentary color of the light. For example, yellow light casts purple shadows, and red light casts green shadows. If you don't believe me, break out a colored light bulb and see for yourself! Good Luck!

In this scene I was going to try two different effects. What I wanted here was the light source coming only from the camera position - like someone holding a flashlight. I used a default radial behind the camera. It looks good, but it's far too bright and doesn't convey a sense of eerieness that a flashlight would. The second effect I wanted to try was a complete bust. I wanted to put a light in the tubes, within the circuitry so that it would shine through in tiny dots but when I replicated the tubes, all the light washed out the scene.

Select the light, click on the E button. Lower the Intensity of the light. If you use a lot of lights, lower the intensity down to 1 even. If it's still too bright, make the color of the light greyer instead of white. Hope that helps! Oh, and for a flash light effect, you might have better luck with a spotlight instead of a radial light.

For the lights inside the tubes, you could also try ranged lighting. (E button)

Rudolf Herczog
Digital Artist
www.rochr.com

Attached Link: http://www.fignations.com/jelisa/tutorials/light1.html

I have a quickie lighting tutorial at my site that might help some.

I'll be trying this out myself, but some quick sugesstions are: For the torch light, how about using a cylindrical/conical light instead of a spherical (radial) light? That will give you a beam (as Jhonpenn has suggested). If you want to project a true life torch beam (with the penumbra, bulb/reflector/lens distortions et al) you'll have to create a gel in Photoshop or any paint program and use it with your spotlight (the gel is imported as a pict object) But as a torch also throws ambient light around, you might want to complement the cylindrical light with a radial light (placed at the same position as the spotlight) and keep it at a low intensity so that it just throws a wash all around. In terms of the tube light, you might simulate it by playing around with the material property and setting ambient in a bright color (whatever you want them to be) and at 100% (or any high percentage as it suits you). You might have to do some post work to get a glow on this light or have it throwing a bit of a wash on objects near it, which should be easy enough to do in photoshop. Try assigning the "Greenlit" material in "Complex fx" in materials and checkout what kind of result you get. Hope this helps. Give a holler in case you want further info or clarifications. :-)

Also, the materials settings affect the look of the lighting. Many materials, if you use them out of the box, will make your scene look washed out because the ambient setting is too high.

I really appreciate all of this advice and jelisa, thank you for that tutorial. I'm going to have to take some time to sit down and work out each of these and see what happens. This has cleared up a lot of the mystery of lighting for me. :)

There's a great lighting tutorial in issue 20 of 3DWorld magazine.

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