Let there be Lighting!

[Rumour]

Lighting can make or break a good scene, and getting it right, is what this forum is all about. How to track down those pesky unwanted shadows that crop up, or how to create them where we want them. Moonlight, diffuse light, bright sunlight, sunrise/sunset, artificial light... the list goes on.

Lighting is one of the areas I find either comes easily to a scene (perhaps by some fluke of mine) or I struggle on it for hours. To that end I got a book out recently on how to do good lighting in a scene, and as I progress through it I'll share some of my discoveries.

[ceph]

sounds good. i often have problems getting the lighting just right - hell i have problems figuring out how i even want the light to be used in the scene, and more often than not i scrap the current idea and end up doing something different where lighting is concerned.

one of the more popular techniques i almost always use is hdri lighting with radiosity combined with either a single or two other lights in the scene to brighten up specific areas, mostly for object scenes. radiosity usually takes care of the shadowing properly and using the other lights i can introduce either more shadowing or more highlighting. i almost never use hdri for indoor scenes though, as unless the hdri image is the one being used for that room/scene, the only other benefit is lighting and reflection sources which can be accomplished without it.