Tricks with Lights

Shane Davison, daviso@cs.uregina.ca

When the active object is a lightsource, right-clicking on the "Set color of current light" or "Set intensity of current light" gadgets in the 'lights' panel allows you to numerically specify the light color and intensity. And in this numerical panel, you can set the light intensity value higher than you can with the light-intensity slider (ie. >2). This is great for really powerful lighting effects - you can even 'wash-out' your scene with light to simulate a nuclear blast.

You can also set the light intensity to a negative value. That's right: NEGATIVE LIGHTS !! This is a very impressive feature and can be used to generate beautiful effects.

Aiming Spotlights

Dale Gass, dale@ra.isisnet.com

Selecting a spotlight and then hitting the "View from Object" button, is a great way to aim spotlights and see their coverage when configuring them.

Visible Lights

See Glows and Visible Lights in the Special Effects section.

Raytraced Shadows VS Shadow Maps

Ian Firth, IanFirthDC@aol.com

I have finally given up on raytraced shadows. They take way too long and are too sharp (unless overlapped with another) edged. I have sinced switched to shadow maps only, but still raytrace for reflections. My render times have dramatically decreased, and the shadow maps actually look better for Indeo AVI's aimed at CDROM playback. Since my current project needs 450MB of compressed (5gig uncompressed) animation and artwork before completion (which spends on average 1 minute per frame in Premiere), this is enabling me to meet my Summer deadline.

Your mileage may vary, but all might look into this as an option to speed render times.

Light Gels -- Projecting Images with Light

Shane Davison, daviso@cs.uregina.ca

You can place a bitmap with some transparency on a plane in front of a light, turn on shadow casting, and have the light "project" your text onto other surfaces.

[Ed. Note: Seems to me that you could also use the above technique with a texture made from an AVI or image sequence. Then you basically have an animated movie projector.]