In this weeks tutorial we learnt how to use Lighting to make the images look more realistic and atmospheric. We learnt how to use the lighting tools ‘Target Spots’ and ‘Omni’ lights. These tools are located in the ‘Lights’ tab which can be found by going to the ‘Create’ menu and then clicking on the button that looks like a lamp shining. The Create menu can be found at the right hand of the screen. The ‘Lighting’ menu gives you a lot of options to choose from but the main ones that I’ll be using is the ‘Target Spots’ and the ‘Omni Lights’.

The ‘Target Spot’ tool is a useful option because it allow the user to light up the image and create shadows that make the image look more realistic. There is also an option to change the different kind of light and the one that I found looked the most realistic was the ‘Mental ray shadow map’. This option creates more realistic shadows but it takes up a lot more memory which in turn will make the rendering time a lot slower. This tool allows the user to direct the light in any direction that they want and the amount of light that the light will produce. To allow the image to have shadows you will have to click on the light that you have placed on the scene and then go to the modifier tab. You then have to got the shadows menu and then click on for the shadows to appear. The changes to the modifiers parameters have to be made before you convert the image into an editable poly. If you didn’t make these changes before then it will be hard to gain the desired effect that your after.

The other tool that I used was the Omni lights. This tool allows the user to add as many lights as they like to a scene to gain the effect that they are after. They can place them anywhere on the scene. You can also change the affect that the light has like the ‘Target Spots’ and one of these options is ‘Volume Light’. This option makes the image look more eerie and creates a sort of fog effect.