Lighting Rig - Moonlight

As I mentioned before, I used a direct lighting rig for my moonlight scenario. I used a combination of spot and point lights with varying intensities and white or blue hues. I began with the spot lights to create the main "moon" light at first, and then carve out the important geometry with rim lighting. After I was satisfied with the main shapes I was seeing, filled in the dark (sometimes virtually black) areas with point lights.

The render camera's view of the scene from within Maya.













Wireframe of the same view.













Only one single light (a spot) had a shadow attached to it. Most of the other spot lights were linked to specific geometry so that shadowing was not so much an issue. Most of them also had Penumbra angles of no more than 10 to soften their edges a bit.

Spot lights are highlighted in light green.













Additionally, one of the most effective (and also efficient) ways of creating more organic light play was to map Solid Fractals to their Color channels.





















The point lights all had their Decay Rate set to Cubic, so there was a finite range that each one would affect. One of the nice conveniences that comes with using a cubic decay is that you do not have to spend time linking lights to geometry in order to limit what they are hitting. Additionally, you do not have to create shadows because the unlit areas can simply serve this purpose. These lights are perfect for creating soft lighting, and are a great cheap replacement for raytracing. Of course, you need to spend more time lighting and less time rendering, whereas raytracing requires the opposite. I do enjoy lighting with point arrays because they allow more art direction and more control over the rendered image, but I know that one of the limitations is their lack of control to make the lighting dynamic.

Point lights are highlighted in light green.













All of the lights were either white or had a blue hue to mimic moonlight and its subsequent bounced light. Naturally, the white lights were aimed at the silhouette of objects, whereas the light blue were placed as fills, and the dark blues served to break up completely black shadows. I found myself using the spot lights more for carving out the profiles of objects, and saving the point lights for softening shadows.

Although I was duplicating lights so that I would not have to keep setting colors and intensities, I was sure to vary both of these parameters slightly, as well as to rotate and offset the lights' positions to keep things as organic and real-worldly as possible. One of the common mistakes that I saw myself making when I first started using point arrays was that I was spacing them too evenly and coloring them too consistently; the result was very flat, CG-looking scenes.

Here are some other views to give a better sense of how lights were offset from one another. The main "moon" light is highlighted in green.