Direct Illumination
Lighting is one of the most important aspects of object modeling. Like in the real world, every object looks different under different lighting conditions. Adjusting the type, angle, and intensity of the lights causes the object to looks different due to the change in shading. For this reason, you can create very realistic models with the right lighting.
You can create lights from the Lights menu. The following types of lights are supported:
Directional Light, Point Light, Spot Light and Hemisphere Light.
Clara.io Lights
- A Directional Light simulates an infinitely far away source of light that casts parallel rays. As such, the position of a directional light is not factored into calculations - only its rotation will have an effect. Thus, directional lights are ideal for representation of sources such as the sun.
- A Point Light simulates an omni-directional light which emits the same amount of light in every direction. If its Distance is non-zero, the light intensity will diminish as it approaches this distance. This type of light is useful for sources such as a light bulb.
- A Spot Light simulates a cone of light with a specific point and direction in space. It illuminates only objects inside in the cone and can be used to generate shadows. Like point lights, spotlights have a maximum distance.
- A Hemisphere Light simulates an area light that illuminates your scene from all directions. This is useful for creating bounce light effects such as sky lights, or other secondary bounce light effects.
V-ray Lights
The V-Ray lights are similar in behavior to the lights of Clara.io. You can learn more about them from the V-ray User Guide.
V-ray Generic Lights
The four generic V-Ray light types are Plane, Sphere, Dome and Mesh, and they are covered fully here.
V-ray Sun Light
Is similar in behavior to Clara.io’s Directional and Hemispherical Lights combined. This is full covered here.
V-ray IES Lights
These light types are specifically designed for V-ray. More information can be found here
