Subtitles of the Movie

The previous light type we looked at is the point light and the point light is a very basic light type but not used as much as the light type we're going to look at now, which is the spotlight. I'm going to go on to my rendering shelf here and click on the spotlight icon to create a new spotlight. And now I maximized this perspective view, head to a lit mode by pressing 7. Now I'm going to move this light and you can see I get a cone of light with a circle where it hits the geometry. If I press the T key on the keyboard, T as in taxi, I get an aim and a base control. It allows me to place that light precisely without having to use the rotation tool on the spotlight itself. Now this is pretty good, but there's actually an even better way to do this. So I'm going to press the Spacebar, get multiple views, and now with my spotlight selected; let me zoom in on that light, I'm going to choose one of these other views and select on Panels, Look Through Selected. Now as I use my regular Camera Controls to zoom in and out, pan, and orbit, I can see that the light is updating over here in this perspective view. I'm going to press the F key on the side view so I can see the light, and now if I press T again, I get this little dial manipulator. Each time I click that, I can run through different visualizations on the light. So this one I'm going to take a look at right now is the cone angle of the light. So as I increase and decrease that cone angle, I change the throw of the light on the wall. And I can see this value changing over here in the channel box as well as I increase and decrease that angle. If I render this right now and I head to my perspective view and create a render, you'll notice that I get a very hard edge, which isn't very realistic looking, and one of the things that's good to do with your spotlights is to soften up that edge. So we'll head to the next visualization by clicking that little dial manipulator and adjust this soft edge, which is called the penumbra angle. So as I increase that and re-render, what I'm going to get is a, in this case, 20 degrees from the edge going out that softens that. This is a little bit more natural-looking. Another setting that can help make your lights look a little more realistic is called the drop-off. So if I increase this drop-off value, what I'll get is a hot center of the light and then a certain number of degrees out to the end of the cone angle, that light will fade off to black. So with that ten degree drop-off, I'll re-rendor. Now I'm getting a softer light on the edges, and it's brighter at the center, which is more realistic. Close that, and back out here and take a look at this again. If I want to move this with my Move tool, right now the Move tool is oriented to the world, which means there's no way to push it directly in and out the way I was in the camera view. So this is a Move tool trick. If I press W, which is what we used to pick the Move tool, and keep that held down on the keyboard and now left click I'm going to get a little marking menu that allows me to choose different axes to align that Move tool to. Instead of the World mode, which is the default, choose Object, and say that now the Z-axis aligned with the rotation of the object itself. So now I can push in and out and preserve that rotation or orientation in the scene. Pull this out a bit more and now take a look at one final render here. That looks nice.