Dear All,
I plan to make a scene where I have a candle that light two swords.
The only issue is that the scene either gets way too blown out or is very dark and the reflections on the swords are not visible due to the darkness. However, I do not want to make the scene full daylight as it gets against the mood. Thus I’m trying with tiny point lights around the swords that do not cast shadows.
Can someone tell me a decent way to pull off a lighting like this?
Thanks in advance.
What have you tried? What does it look like with settings somewhere in between blown out and very dark?
Since you didn’t post a blend or some pictures showing your scene, the only advise I can remember, is to read some photography books about illumination. Most of your issues are probably there.
A few suggestions . . .
(1) There’s actually no reason at all for the candle to be “a practical light.” (That is to say, an actual source of illumination.) It need only be an apparent one. A soft, warm-yellow spotlight with high fall-off can be used to cast light on nearby objects in a way that “looks like a candle did it.” Another soft spot or two can “warm up” the general area. (The very-nicest thing about CG lamps is that you can’t see them.)
(2) I suggest that you start with good ol’ “global illumination.” Light that comes from everywhere. Use this to set the baseline exposure of the scene: the level of light that ensures that no shadows are opaque-black. Use a cool color for this. Then, after deciding where your candle is supposed to be, add warm yellow spotlights turned way down, with the purpose of adding the necessary light just where it is needed.
= = = Specific Workflow:
“First, put a plausible-looking ‘candle’ in it,” using whatever renderer you prefer. Look for a way to produce a single RenderLayer, or perhaps an entirely separately-rendered MultiLayer OpenEXR file, which contains: “just the candle, ma’am.”
“Then, ‘light the scene,’ absent(!) the candle,” which after all is not contributing any ‘light’ to the scene anyway.
Feel free to employ any-and-all of the rendering strategies that Blender offers you: BI, Cycles, Game/OpenGL. “Blender’s node-based compositor is your bestest friend.”
In other, otherwise-unrelated “computer-programming geek(!)” circles, we have a catch-phrase that we call “Tim Toady”: TMTOWTDI = “There’s More Than One Way To Do It.™” “Always remember that . . .™” :ba: Any strategy that produces “the arrangement of pixels that you want, ahead of Deadline,” is fair game.