| Page 2 of 2 |
Once you load the scene into LightWave, load any necessary props back in and you can start lighting the scene in LightWave. Since LightWave doesn't use "real" light settings, you can just figure it out yourself... in my instance, I used a spot light set to 45 degrees and 50% intensity to represent a 500 watt shop light (our standard lights for now, and a great way to get lots of lights when you first start out...) with a few measurements from your existing lights, you can figure out what the heights and angles you can do with your lights are... If you really want to you can build a simple representation of your actual lights, this would help in figuring out motion so you know it you can get the lighting you want without the actors knocking it over. Note that I added a point light, colored green, against the greenscreen with intensity falloff set to about two meters to approximate green spill from the light bouncing off of the screen and onto the actors. As soon as I did a test render after that, I figured I had to move the actors out from the greenscreen. (they were also polluting the greenscreen by casing shadows onto it that were too strong.) You can use LightWave's different shadow calculation methods to imitate things like a diffuse spot or a bounced light source by using shadow mapping and/or intensity falloff. (Those shop lights produce rather bright, harsh light...)
LightWave's openGL views show you a fair approximation of the final lighting. It also shows pretty clearly the tearing that Poser models are sometimes prone to... You can load them into Modeler and triple them to reduce this effect some, but even 'normal' poses seem to do it easily. Even though you may be tempted to, do NOT merge points on the model, as this disturbs the point order and keeps the Poser displacement plugin from operating properly. If you need to do extensive animation of the Poser figures, I advise importing just the objects themselves into LightWave, merging poiints, tripling the polygon and then animting the figures within LightWave. Even so, that means that you have a remarkable library of figures available for use within LightWave. There are dozens of sites on the web with Poser character libraries in them, and you can probably import most of them into LightWave through the Pro Pack.
The finished lighting setup shows good flat lighting on the greenscreen, no pollution, and minimized spill while the characters have a good lighting scheme on them that is completely independent of the greenscreen. If you have a rather complex lighting situation to work with, a little previz in your favorite 3d software can probably save you a lot of grief at the shoot. Have fun!
Jon Carroll is a writer and animator living in Los Angeles, CA.
Prev 1 2
Related sites: • Animation Artist • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Game Developer • Digital Post Production • Film and Video Magazine
Related forums:
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
