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If there is any one thing you can do to get better at lighting, it is to actively, consciously practice seeing deeply into the lighting surrounding you in your daily life.

— jim coe

Lighting Adobe Atmosphere 3D models - My Tutorials

Step-by-step instructions for lighting your Adobe Atmosphere 3D scenes are available elsewhere (for instance, the F3 key in the Atmosphere authoring program). Instead, my pages mostly offer you small 3D model lighting demonstrations. Some of my pages also have tips, techniques or Atmosphere JavaScript code. You will need the Adobe Atmosphere plug in for Microsoft Internet Explorer, if you want to explore inside my demo scenes.

But Which Pictures Are 3D?

Since Adobe Atmosphere uses 2D pictures to enter 3D scenes, you might be confused about which pictures on these pages lead to 3D scenes. To clarify, i will add orange borders to all pictures which will load as 3D scenes when you click on them - if you have the Adobe Atmosphere player installed in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Demo Pages May Load Slower

When my demo pages contain one or more Adobe Atmosphere 3D scenes, they will take a bit longer to load, especially on dial-up Internet connections. I think you'll find that the educational value of 3D more than makes up for this delay.

About My Demo Rooms

To show you how Adobe Atmosphere 3D model lighting works, I have built small standardized 3D scenes with test "rooms".

My standard 3D lighting scene has a visible light source and a vertical square "test column". Two typical demo "rooms" are shown in the 2D image to the left.

When the models are meant to be compared, the light sources are always set to the same brightness.

Light sources you would make invisible are always revealed in these demos.

This diagram shows a plan view of why my 3D modeled light sources are positioned as they are.

Most demos have 100% white sides and bottoms for maximum light reflection. You should understand that they have no light reflections from above, since they have no top coverings. This is so you can see and enter from above.

With nothing to reflect the light back into the rooms from above, the lighting is less diffuse and dimmer than in an all white environment. That is, the light is not mixed as much nor as bright as it would be with a white ceiling.

Another thing you should keep in mind is that the light map "Sample Size" is often set to the minimum of 0.1 (maximum number of light samples). Thus, shadows and other lighting detail will be as sharp and fine as possible, due to the larger number and smaller size of the areas sampled for lighting calculation. This is like giving Atmosphere a clearer view of your scene.

You need to understand Sample Size because it has a major impact on rendering time Vs quality, when you want to light your Adobe Atmosphere scene. Sample Size is discussed on my pages about sun-lighting and rendering.

3D Modeling of Lighting in Adobe Atmosphere Computer Graphics

If you understand a bit about how light is simulated in Adobe Atmosphere, it might help your lighting work.

Radiosity (pronounced "ray de awe city") Vs Ray Tracing
Adobe Atmosphere uses a system for calculating your 3D lighting called 'Radiosity'. Radiosity is now considered by many experts to be the highest quality method of lighting 3D models.

You have probably also seen the most popular other method, called 'Ray Tracing', which Adobe Atmosphere does not have. A few professional solid modeling programs allow a scene to be lighted with either or both systems. But this is only to produce 2D images, not for interactive, immersive scenes over the web.

Your take-home concept here is the idea that Radiosity is allows more realism by considering all the light - even diffuse light (light that reaches a surface by being reflected from other surfaces). Ray Tracing only models light that travels directly from light sources to (or through) surfaces and then enters the lens of a simulated camera.

And most important of all, Radiosity allows the lighting to be calculated and stored in a scene file when you build your scene, so that lighting does not have to be calculated "on-the-fly" for each visitor to your scene each time they move or turn.

Radiosity also models the fact that a colored surface can reflect some of its color onto another surface, changing the color of the second surface. Have you ever lighted an Adobe Atmosphere scene with a green lawn and seen it turn the lower part of a white wall slightly green? This sort of thing happens all the time in the real world, though we may not notice.

As i've mentioned, the 3D programs that do Ray Tracing don't attempt to share 3D immersive, real time, scenes through the web. Even though Ray Tracing is desirable, given the Internet bandwidth constraints the Adobe developers faced, Radiosity was the best choice for something like virtual reality in a web site.

You should understand that Radiosity can simulate light that behaves very much the way it does in the real world. In my opinion, what Radiosity lacks that Ray Tracing has is lovely, but not critical. It is mainly the ability to render realistic 'optical' effects. For example, imagine sunlight from a window going through a glass bottle, distorting the view through the bottle and creating patterns of light on a white tablecloth. Or think of two mirrors reflecting each other, or a scene being reflected in a chrome object. Ray Tracing is very pretty and convincing with scenes like these, but its absence is not a show-stopper.

I think the Adobe Atmosphere developers did a fantastic job with their Radiosity implementation. For instance, I was delighted when I created a demo of light from a red, a green and a blue 'spotlight' mixing together. I set the three model lights to the same distance from a white screen and set all to the same brightness. With no adjustments or tweaking whatsoever, the colors mixed perfectly!











Here is a 2D rendering of a 3D scene I made using Ray Tracing in the old POV program.

Note the multiple optical reflections.

Just Look Natural

Your task when lighting your scenes is made easier because Adobe Atmosphere 3D lighting behaves so much like lighting does in the real world. To get realistic results, you need only set up virtual reality lighting situations that mimic the real world. What you have learned to expect from your real world experience of light is pretty much what you'll get - once you understand the use of the Adobe Atmosphere lighting interface.

Of course you won't get your 3D lighting 'just right' on the first try, since you have to do at least a fast light rendering to even see how you like it. But by setting the light rendering for minimum time and perfecting your lighting patiently over several tries, you can do very dramatic scenes.

So, be patient and remember that a few seemingly tiny improvements have a way of eventually adding up in a big way. Excellent light modeling is a craft that requires patience, perseverance and keen observation of light in the real world.

Which brings us to the idea that a major advantage of Adobe Atmosphere's quality lighting is that whatever you can learn, by careful observation of lighting in the real world, will directly help you as your world's Virtual Lighting Director.

If there is any one thing you can do to get better at lighting, it is to actively, consciously practice seeing deeply into the lighting surrounding you in your daily life. So really start looking! In this respect, we photographers have a big advantage over those of you with 'untrained' eyes, since most people became "lazy observers" before they reached their teens.

In fact, i would recommend that anyone who has a serious interest in 3D modeling of lighting invest in a digital camera and spend an hour a day making photographs. You'll learn to see much better and get lots of good photo textures as well.

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