Elexus Designs: Rendering Environments with Lighting (Samples)

Lighting Sample #1

During my continuation with lighting techniques and appliances, my tutor showed me a unique way of rendering a photorealistic scene with a skylight, using a multiplier and setting an ambience/diffuse to create a sombre effect over the lighting and shadowing of the environment. The effect of which is to soften the overall scene, reduce the sharpness of the edges and textures. For the following screenshot render, I had dropped the multiplier for the skylight to 0.72 applying a yellow back ambience and using an omni close to the right column in order to generate a soft scene, alothough the lighting was not quite dark enough and the rendering took far too long, animation wise this would not be sufficient.

Lighting Sample #2

Using omni's and applying an ambient blue to represent the cold environment more. Omni's made a great effect with ustilising shadows and the normals form the texture maps where bumped with their presence which also confirmed my suspicions that a bump map cannot operate withoout a lighting source other than a skylight, which makes sense, through my understanding a normal map needs to be defined by a normalised vector calculation of direction therefore the normal could not be multiplied by the vector matrix in order to create the bump mapping impression. Also, the blue effect was too heavy creating a rather blue overlay that didn't fit the scene, the yellow warm ambience I believe didn't break the setting of a dark environment and also complemented the yorkshire stone colour.