Technical Slop

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Light Rig

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Light Rig

A quickie for Max 5. Some of the ideas presented here should be compatable with other 3d progs.

Some where I was reading about using lighting to explore the contours of a model. Use two lights at opposite sides to light a model from two different directions. What this does is show contours much better than with just one light. Being the curious fellow that I am, I tried doing this with the default two light set-up in Max. The problem is, the lights didn't move when I moved around the viewport. Talk about suck. So I decided to set up a lighting "rig" so I could use this two light technique that sounds so awesome.

The idea is to set up two lights that move around with a camera.

The first thing is to set up a visual target. This acts as a go-between for the lights to the target, and a visual guide for the Look At constraint.

All it is is a circular spline with a vertical line showing which way is "up". One spline object. Not too hard to make.

Add a Target Camera, and link the spline to the camera's target spot. Again, not too hard.

So far the spline is not directly on top of the camera's target.

Here is why the spline object is not on top of the target: to show a problem with the linking. You see, the spline will move with the target, but it won't rotate. Not good.

That's were the Look At constraint comes in. So give the spline a Look At constraint and pick the camera itself as the target. Then I aligned the spline to be on top of the target.

Tada.

Now, set one of the viewports to Camera01. Where ever the camera is pointing, the spline will be dead center and pointing "up". If you zoom in and out, the spline will get bigger or smaller, but still pointing "up".

Add two omni lights and link them to the spline. How ever the spline moves and/or rotates, the lights will follow.

Here I moved the camera around. See how the spline behaves in accordance with the camera position? Man, now that is spiffy. Too bad this doesn't really illustrate how the lights move with the spline. :sigh:

Here is a torus knot showing how the lighting "rig" works when viewed from the camera. No matter how I move the camera around, the terminator from the lighting is clearly visible. Shows contours *very* well. You should see this in action on organic models. Talk about nice - very easy to find those rough spots on a busty babe model.

While the set up is nice for finding rough spots and exploring, I find it kind of hard to work with when modeling. So I pick another viewport, set it to Perspective, go to Configure for that viewport, and use Default Lighting with 1 light. So, one viewport is for examining the models contours (Camera01) and another viewport is the one I actually work in (Perspective).

Well, that was fun, but don't take my word for it. Try it for yourself.

play.fiddle.learn