Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> Stephen wrote:
>> Have a Google for studio lighting tutorials, you may find something
>> useful. And maybe you can find a tutorial on photography composition to
>> help with the scene. I use a modeller so I can have an idea what the
>> scene will look like before rendering.
> Strobist is a great lighting resource. It is more geared to
> photographers, and getting them to use off-camera flashes, but the same
> ideas for separating the subject from the background by changing light
> distances and intensities is just as usable in POV. Their image pool on
> Flickr is good inspiration as well.
> 

The concepts are the same or very similar. I found a site several years 
ago (now long lost) that dealt with 3 point lights and fill in spots. 
PovRay has the advantage of having shadowless lights for fill ins. :-D

> I work from an engineering mindset when building a scene. Either I know
> what the end result is going to be, and just keep tweaking the pieces
> until it gets there; or I know what the pieces are and I just play with
> random numbers until something ends up where I like it.


I find the OpenGL view of a modeller comes as a boon and a blessing to 
men and much quicker than doing three elevations. ;-)

A paraphrase of an old advert for fountain pens

They came as a boon and a blessing to men, The Pickwick, the Owl and the 
Waverley Pen.


-- 

Best Regards,
	Stephen

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Stephen <mca### [at] aolDOTcom> wrote:
phic artist, and I don't think I ever will be. :-(
>

> looking at the images too long and see it differently than others would
> see it.

When I've been working/looking at a scene too long, every now and then I'll
'flip' it in Photoshop, to get a mirror-image of the scene. This presents a
wholly different viewpoint, and usually shows me where my composition is off.

Many times, my scenes start out with some 'simple' thing that I'd like to
see--with no real thought as to how it might develop--then I'll build on it
'organically'.  One thing leads to another, and before long I have a scene
that looks interesting and worth following. (It may even lead to eliminating the
original thing I started with!) As you can imagine, this is a *slow* way of
sketching out an idea; but it's a useful way when I don't have a clue as to what
I really want to create.

I would guess that most artists--in any medium--go though a great deal of
frustrating ideation (sketches, musical dead-ends, copying what others have
done, etc.) before hitting on something that 'works.' The audience only sees the
beautiful finished product, which seems to have arrived full-blown from nowhere.
 Not so! Yet the more an artist works and thinks, the better and faster he
becomes--like exercising a muscle.

Ken

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