Tuesday, February 6, 2007

A simple Heliodon setup


Let's assume you have a building site and now you want to do some outside rendering. To give it an optimistic, comfortable mood we want a lot of sunlight in our scene. To do so we set the time to July or August. The time of the day will adjust the angle of our light coming into the scene. If you want longer shadows set something in the morning or evening, for shorter shadows we need something at noon. Artlantis will now calculate the sun direction automatically, but you can change it manually in 2D view (as in the screenshot). I suggest setting the direction of the Heliodon to go with the camera view and then to slide a little.

The first input box with the sun/cloud icon adjusts the direct light. The ( ) radiocity box underneath sets the diffuse or indirect light. Theoretically there is no need to check the radiocity box, but I recommend using it in order to soften you image and to give it a warmer appeal. To achieve a mid-summer coloring set the radiocity color to a very bright yellow, for example RGB (255, 255, 240).