Basics of lighting theory

Start with darkness!

When creating the lights for your scenes, don’t throw all the lights in the scene right away. Build up your lighting system, one light at a time if necessary.

Try to avoid using ambient lights. Ambient lights usually fill the scene with flat, uniform light. A lot of people have the bad habit of using ambient lights to add a global illumination effect. Many lighting artists will add their own fill lights as they see it fit to provide the secondary light sources.

• Test your lights with simpler objects before adding the lighting system to your complex scene.
  • 95% of your time creating lighting systems will be spent on revising and adjusting your values of the lights.
  • Using the IPR rendering output will work great for this testing stage. However, IPR doesn’t work with raytraced images (i.e. raytraced shadows).

Save multiple versions of the lighting files.