Jim's Night-Lighting Tutorial

Okay, I can't say that this is the ONLY way to do lighting.  Or even the BEST way to do lighting.  I simply say that this is MY way of doing lighting.  It's based on what I've learned reading photography books on lighting, studying how Hollywood lights scenes, and how rennaisance painters lit their scenes. Okay, first, let's discuss what you REALLY see when it's dark. The human eye adapts to darkness fairly well, all things considered.  We see better at night than many creatures do.  Horses, for example, are pretty much blind at night.  So are most large herbivores.  It's why when Native Americans did cliff-drives of buffalo, they most often did them at night.  During the day, you can't spook a buffalo for shit.  At night, however, they can't see a damn thing, and a bunch of screamin', whoopin' guys with torches can easily spook 'em, and drive them all off a large cliff to their deaths. That said, however, once the light level falls low enough, our color vision no longer works.  Instead, we see everything in shades of gray.  And below a certain point, we don't see a damn thing.  A human will stumble around and fall in a small room lit only by a cigarette ember, while a cat can see just fine in the same lighting.  Thus, when we do "night" scenes, we have to remember that what you REALLY see at night is a lot of nothing - it's dark.  And even if it is light enough for you to see, you only see in shades of gray.  If it's light enough for you to see in color, well, hell, it's not really dark, then.  So, photographers, painters and hollywood filmmakers use various tricks to tell your mind "this is night" - the most common of which being deep shadows, blue or otherwise soft lighting, and hot-spots for lights only on the important elements of the scene. So, let's set up a basic scene using an old Poser 4 character, "Lawgirl"! Okay, scene is up and looks alright.  Now, we need to think about lighting.  After we strip out all the default lights, step one (for me) is the overall environment.  Since this is a tutorial about night lighting, hey, it's outdoors, and it's night.  Outdoor night means dim blue global ambient, coming from the sky and traffic and various city lights and what not.  We want it juuuuuuuust barely bright enough to pick out the mortar in the bricks.  And I'll have Ambient Occlusion on, because it might give us the beginnings of some decent shadows where edges meet.  Also, since this is an alley, most of the actual light will be coming from above, so I'll be using IBL with a texture map that looks like this: And this is what we get: Hey, see that cool-lookin' cone of light thingie?  Well, that's an actual cone prop I attached to her flashlight.  Because dude, gettin' Poser to render a decent light-cone from a spot requires I use atmospherics.  And you know what?  I got other things to do than wait a few days for Poser to grind through atmospheric calculations.  So hey, light cone.  Old trick I picked up from Poser 5, still use it.  Also, the front lens on her flashlight is set to white ambient with a value of fifty, because I intend to use IDL in this scene.  Let's flick on indirect lighting, poke the render button and see what it looks like. Hey, now we're cookin' with gas.  Next, we want to highlight two things:  The character in the scene, and the focal point of the action.  Usually these two things are the same, because 99.99999999999875% of Poser renders are straight-up character studies, and the rest are about evenly divided between action-shots of some bold hero beating the crap out of something, romantic scenes and erotica.  In this scene, however, the character and the focus of the action are two different areas.  So, I want a soft blue spot that calls attention to the character, and another that calls attention to the door she's lookin' at. Hey, gettin' better. Now, I got like a bajillion modeled raindrops hangin' there, plus I got specular on the walls, plus I got water in the alley.  Yanno, I'd like at least SOME of that to show.  So, I add a pale blue specular-only light (thanks, Nan!) to pop that out, plus switch on reflections to get the water in the alley to show. Now, right there, that's actually good enough to say "This Is Night" for most purposes.  If we're not going to rely on the flashlight to light up the scene, we just brighten up the two blue spots and we're golden. But, I intend to have the flashlight add a bit of realism and drama, so we move on. Next, I do a little jiggering with the flashlight effect. Ambient up so it'll work as an indirect light source, add a spot to brighten where she's actually shining it at, add another cone to simulate the mag-lite's focal center, and we tweak the transparency on the cone so the edges are faded, rather than crisp. The key here is that the brightest light is on the point of danger - where she's looking. This heightens the drama of the scene, yet maintains the "it's night" look. And again, most people would stop there, because that's actually pretty good.  It's exceptional when you consider that the character you're looking at is an unmodified P4 Casual Woman with a simple procedural for skin and some rudimentary textures on her clothing. But, there's not enough drama in the scene for me, so now we tweak the lights a bit more. Now, all this has been done with depth-mapped shadows.  I know raytracing is faster, but depth-mapped shadows lets you do some interesting tricks.  Like switch to the shadow-cam for the blue spot that's pointed at her head, zoom in real close so she completely fills the window, then change the shadow map dimensions to 1024 (always use power of 2 for shadow maps, never make a map bigger than this).  The result is the shadow has nice, depth-mapped edges, and now is deeper and darker. Add in a few thousand splashes for raindrops and other simple postwork, and there we are. And that's how I do night lighting.