Electric Image Animation System 7 Tutorials
Lighting / Shadows pt. 1
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Subtitles of the Movie (Electric Image Animation System 7 / Lighting / Shadows pt. 1)
Shadows are created by lights. Only Radial, Parallel, and Spotlights are able to generate Shadows. You enable Shadows in the light's Shadow tab in its Info Window by clicking here. There are two types of shadows: Buffer and a Raytrace. Buffer is by far the fastest, but Raytrace is the most realistic. Let's take a look at what a Buffer type of shadow looks like. I have one Fill light and one Key light that's a Radial light and that light is generating a shadow. Let's render a Snapshot. Very fast. Enabling the Shadow did not really slow down the render at all, and the quality of the Shadow looks pretty good. Let's look at the Top View. We know that a Radial light shines out in a sphere shape, so why do we have a direction arrow sticking out from this bulb? Once we enable Shadows with a light, Animator needs us to tell it which way the Shadows are supposed to fall. A Radial light should make shadows all around it in a circle, right? Not with a Buffered shadow. Buffered shadows are calculated from a point of view of the light, kind of like taking a picture but in depth. Click on the light to select in any World View and we see a cone projecting from a bulb, kind of like a spotlight. This cone describes where the shadow is being calculated. Anything within that cone, or buffer, will be calculated as having a shadow. I have another Sphere, which I'll turn on and re-render. The second Sphere is not casting a shadow. From our Top View we can see that even though the Camera sees both Spheres, the light contains only the red Sphere in its shadow Buffer. Let's click on the checkbox Outside Buffer Area in Shadow, and re-render. Now we see very clearly where the Shadow Buffer is being calculated. We basically told this light that everything outside of this frame is in Shadow or not lit by this light. The resolution of the Buffer is set in these two fields: Buffer Size X and Buffer Size Y. The amount of area covered is determined by the size of the Shadow Cone. The Shadow Cone is set in the Properties tab here. The wider the cone the more area is covered within the Shadow Buffer. If you do that then you'll probably want to increase the values in the Buffer Size fields to keep your shadows looking as smooth as possible. The option to Calculate Shadow Only Once is a rendering feature. If none of your objects which have shadows are moving, then EI only needs to calculate the shadows once. It will keep the Buffered Shadows in memory. This is great if you have a moving camera but no moving objects, like walking around a car. Shadow Color enables you to have a colored shadow. Just click once on the Color box to open the Color Picker. Let's re-render. Now we have a brown shadow. Let's change the shadow back to black. The fields at the bottom help describe the quality of the shadow. Gap and Transition both help describe the apparent relationship between the object casting a shadow and the surface the shadow is hitting. This especially comes into play when a model is standing on a solid surface like a cup on a table. The Gap value is the apparent space, if any, between the two objects. The Transition value is the fade-in of the shadow from that contact edge. Let's change the Gap to 20 and the Transition to 15 and render. Here, the space between the Sphere and the beginning of the shadow is the Gap. The fade-in of the shadow is the Transition. Let's undo both of those changes. Softness is the overall blurriness of the shadow and smoothing mostly smoothes out the shadow's edges, like so. Here you go. Sample describes how many times an area in the Buffer is examined in the Shadow calculation and is mostly helpful for reducing any apparent noise in the shadow. See our first render? Let's use the Magnifying Glass in this image's Window to get a closer look at the edge here. That's a bit noisy. Now, let's up the Samples to 20 and the noise goes away. Darkness is the Opacity of the shadow. Let's change it to 0.5 and render. Next we'll take a look at Raytrace shadows.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Electric Image Animation System 7 |
| Author: | Scott Simmons |
| SKU: | 33996 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-45-9 |
| Release Date: | 2009-06-01 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 102 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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