Effective lighting is probably one of the most difficult things to learn in Lightwave. Almost everyone in this class, during their presentations for the first project, claimed to have the most troubles with lighting their scene, and for good reason too. Lightwave has a ton of great tools that you can use with the lights that can increase the photo realism of your scene. One of those tools is volumetrics.
Volumetric lighting enables your lights to have actual physical volume.
For example, this picture above. Notice how the light affects the objects (trees) in the scene (creating silhouettes, backlighting) but we can see the beam break around the trees and create these translucent beams of light. With volumetric lighting, we can create these sorts of effects in our scenes. Pretty spiffy, huh?
Press it and it will bring up a dialogue box that looks like this:
This box contains the settings for your light source. Here, you can adjust how intense your light is, what color it is, its falloff settings, et cetera. If you look a little further down in the dialogue box, you'll notice a little box that isn't checked called "Volumetric Lighting."
If you click that box, it will turn on the volumetrics for that light source. You notice that once you clicked on that box, the properties button next to it lit up. If you click on that button, you can adjust all your volumetric lighting properties.
For this tutorial I threw together a simple room with a brick texture on the walls and floor. On one wall I placed a window for outside light to filter through. I placed a table and a candle on the side of the room opposite to the window. Obviously, the scene isn't too much too look at. Boooorrrrrriiiinnnngg . . . If you'd like to download this scene for your own experiments, go ahead, the zip file is here
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Already in the scene are two light sources: A point light from the candle and a spot light from the window. However, all the light does is, well, what it's supposed to do: light up the room and cast shadows. But the light itself really has no volume. Let's enable volumetric lighting.
Click on the Scene Editor button (top left under the "Rendering" pull down menu, Keyboard shortcut CTRL + F1), and select "Light." This is your spotlight, and is our ambient lighting from outside the room. Enable Volumetric lighting, and set the values to the following (in both light properties and volumetric lighting properties):
Now take a render. Notice how the light now has a blue, foggy feel. We can actually see beams of light.
Now its time to do some work on the candle. In the Scene Editor, select candlelight, then Item Properties, and set the values to the folowing in the Light Properties and Volumetric Lighting Properties tabs.
Okay, take another render. Not too shabby, eh? Now we have a glowing candlelight.
Though this render isn't one of the most impressive works of art in the world, it does show you what volumetric lighting can do, and how it can take a pretty plain scene and give it a little spunk.