Lightwave
3D Environment Lighting is our new 64-page tutorial series, where over the course of six chapters we detail techniques on lighting an environment under a number of different conditions. Each chapter covers a step-by-step guide to setting up lights, aimed at portraying the scene in a specific manner.

The various chapters are tailored to specific software packages, and each aims to show a comprehensive and effective way of lighting an interior of a ship that includes both natural and artificial light. These include a sunny afternoon, sunset, moonlight, electric light, candlelight and finally a submerged submarine light. The schedule is as follows:

Chapter 01:
Sunny Afternoon In this chapter we show you an example of how to create a warm and friendly lighting condition, such as you would find on a sunny day. Our scene is a ship’s interior, and what we are looking to achieve is the lighting effect of a “sunny afternoon”. We are using the latest LightWave version 9.2, but you should also be able to follow this tutorial with older versions.

Chapter 02:
Twilight In this second instalment we aim to capture the mood of a scene at sunset.

Chapter 03:
Moonlight In this part we light our scene by moonlight. Our moonlight will shine into the scene from above, through the large opening in the roof.

Chapter 04:
Electrical In this part we start in the same way that be began the last part, by creating the light from the moon. This will give us a good contrast between the dark night that is visible outside and the electrical light that we wish to have inside.

Chapter 05:
Candlelight In this chapter we want to light our ship’s interior scene with the help of three candles.

Chapter 06:
Underwater In this last instalment our ship has been sunk, so we will cover the creation of an underwater scene. The scene setup will be quite different this time, and it requires some post work in your favourite image editing software as well.

Environment Lighting Designed & Modelled by Richard Tilbury
Tutorial by Roman ‘dOUGh-CGI’ Kessler