The studio setup, part 1b


2. In the studio


Here's a .zip file for you

This here is our studio. The modeling was so simple, that I don't think it's necessary to get in depth with that one :-) The backdrop is similar to the ones often used in real studios, with a curved, smooth transition from floor to the wall, effectively giving us a "horizonless" background.

The walls of our studio are a poly-flipped box, with single sided surface so we can see through them from the outside. A luxury only possible with 3D software! Even though we will frame all our shots in the backdrop screen, we will need these walls later.
 
 

And here's a quick render of  "Studio_01.lws", it's included in the .zip, you may wish to open the scene.

Well, looks dull, as the lighting scheme is the basic LW one. Surfacing is also the wery basic setup, but that will change later. The objects combined in the .lwo were included in the LW software CD, except for the ball... I managed to have the cow there again!

All renders in this tutorial were done at D1 PAL resolution, 720*576. I didn't use AA for most of the tests (One would be crazy to waste time for it when test rendering) but reducing the image size in photoshop works like pseudo-AA, reducing jaggies. Sometimes it's wiser to render also the final output without AA at high resolution (2*video) and then resize to D1 in paint app! (And sometimes at lower resolution and enh. high AA and then enlarging - it always depends on the case ;-)

Here's the same scene again, with ambiend turned to zero, and the light turned to spotlight, zoomed in the cone angle a bit. As you can see, the first one has a resemblence to outdoors daylight scene, and just by changing the light type, we now have an indoors setup.

As a final touch, i added a point light at 40% intensity and a 6.0 meters falloff from below the floor to mimic light reflecting from the floor, which is an often used fake radiosity trick. Specular highlights are turned off for this light. I also set the spotlight to shadow map to soften the shadows a bit (to be exact, i set the shadow fuzziness to 5.0).

This basic one-spot scene is included as Studio_02.lws. But there's more to lights than just simple spots...

Next we will tackle area lights, and also some fake replacements for them.

 

 
 

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