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Introduction

Lightning is one of the most important things in CG-art. Ever since CG exists, artists wanted to
create perfect copies of real life. One big problem was lighting up the scene.
Where to put the different spots to get a half-decent result? In this short article we want to explain the 3 basic methods of lightning. This tutorial is focused on bloody beginners and should help them to choose the right lightning technic for their projects.

The three lightning techniques are: The three lights scene, the sphere of lights and lightning with mental ray. The three lights scene is very easy to handle: Just place 3 different spot-lights around the scene. Although the results look quite good for CG-art, real“freaks” can’t be satisified with this kind of lightning, me included. Therefore another solution exists. The “Sphere of Lights”, which is a a dome of lights that give nice soft shadows. The results are quite amazing but the script creates hundreds of spotlights around the scene which make the handling a bit complicated.

The last solution is Mental Ray, a Renderer that comes with 3dsmax6. With the help of this renderer you can create photorealistc effects that are not feasible with the normal scanline renderer.

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