Image 1- HDRI lighting (high dynamic range image)
Image 2- Skydome lighting(indirect lighting)
o.k, here we go..... one of the hardest things to do in 3D (for me at any rate), is lighting your scene in a "realistic" way. That is, not to be photoreal, but so that the objects, background etc all combine in such a way as to make us believe that our scene truly "exists". In both of the above pictures, both straight out of lightwave with no re-touching (hard to believe I know!) no lights are being used, rather they are lit with the radiosity feature turned on. They are my attempt to untangle the confusion when people say "radiosity rendered". I'll briefly outline the techniques I used for each pic.
#1 - the Skydome technique
My favourite look, I started playing with this type of scene after looking at some of the "ARNOLD" renders that were floating around... Once you understand the principal behind this, it gets very easy, what we try to do is create a virtual skydome (hence the name) make the scene you want to render, then make a giant sphere which surrounds the whole thing...I like to use tessalated spheres as the light seems to be more "omnidirectional" but that could just be my tired old eyes starting to clap out... now flip all the polys of the sphere inwards by pressing the "f" key, we're almost there, using the surfaces panel, select the spherepolys (which you would've named sphere or sky or whatever when you were creating it, like we all do...god forbid we forget to name our surfaces as we go along) & apply your settings...Of course we will concentrate on the luminosity settings because thats where our light is created from, the luminousness of the sphere! (try saying that without feeling foolish) I tend to use about a 85% - 110% setting, along with changing the colour (notice the spelling for our American cousins) to one of almost white yellow....I also change the diffuse setting to 0% if you dont want to see the skydome just have it unseen by camera....or dont point your camera at it! We're on the home stretch now....go to your light properties & turn all intensities to 0% Now click global illumination..turn ambient intensity to 0% & click enable radiosity, plus cache radiosity to speed up any antialiasing you might use... now hit F9... that should be it... (see the bottom of the page for a zip file containing all the files for these 2 scenes)
#2 - HDRI images (I'm still playing with this one)
HDRI is a term used to describe a picture which has been saved in such a way as to make its luminance & contrast available to be used to light a 3D scene, there seems to be a lot of web sites devoted to them, all very technical & interesting (yawn) but for me the simplest way to get the right HDRI image is to make my own! I load the pic I want in L[6] as a background image & save the rendered output as one of the HDRI formats L[6] ships with (normally TiffLogLuv, I dont know why, I guess its because of my prepress background, I just get all gooey when I see that .tiff format!) voila! your very own HDRI pic.... now to use it... start L[6], load your objects, go to your light properties & turn all intensities to 0% now click global illumination..turn ambient intensity to 0% & click enable radiosity, plus cache radiosity to speed up any antialiasing you might use... now hit F9... you should see (if you have show rendering in progress turned on - render options) the radiosity being calculated, then a black pic being rendered....o.k now to light it! click on the settings tab to enable us to click on the Backdrop tab, the add enviroment & choose "imageworld".. this is when we realize we havent loaded our HDRI pic so we click on the image editor tab & load image....find where you saved your pic & load it up. Now back to the "imageworld" bit (exciting isnt it!) The LightProbe Image is our HDRI render, this is what will light our scene, thats it..now hit F9 again...amazing eh? you can play with the brighness levels etc, if you really want to get fancy you could use the image editor to play with the hue, brightness, saturation etc
Here is a zipped file containing all of the scenes, objects, etc.. have fun with me!