"How Camp" wrote:
> I've used POV for a long time, but I find lighting to be one of my biggest
> challenges in scene development.  I thought it might be interesting to get some
> examples from the community on creative ways to light a scene:
>
> Below is a primitive scene (no pun intended) with only a basic light source.
> With the restriction that you aren't allowed to change the camera or the objects
> (including their mundane textures), what creative lighting solutions can you
> come up with to make this image more interesting?
>
I find it a challenge, too, and usually just use a primary light source low in
the scene to give the image a sense of depth.  I tend to use a bit of radiosity
to smooth shadows, and add small fill-in lights where needed, often near the
camera's position.  I find aggressive antialiasing can hide many sins.  (This
image has +A0.05 +R4, though +R2 or 3 and a larger +A0.1 is usually all that is
needed.)

But to me, the interest in a scene comes more from it's ability to tell a story.
 Usually the stories are very simple, and need not be the same story for
everyone viewing the image.  My father was a semi-professional photographer and
I grew up learning the basics: that framing is by far the most important skill
to master.  In a real world, if you look hard enough you can find a good shot
anywhere.  Lighting and lens tricks can certainly improve the quality of a
photograph and help bring the the story to life.

Of course, POV-Ray does not capture the real world, but it does not eliminate
the need to tell a story.  The first thing I had to do was figure out a plot for
the provided scene, without reframing it.  I saw representations of the elements
Earth, Air, and Fire and decided there was magic happening, but it's incomplete.
 The two objects in the foreground don't quite fit.  It's the basic story of the
search for completion (to me).

My radiosity skills are near to nonexistent, but I decided to try lighting the
scene by using the cone as a light source.  I cheated a bit by adding no_image
no_shadow objects to the looks_like of the lights used, and added a similar
large sphere around the scene to contain some absorbing media and tone down the
ambient contribution of the plane in the distance.  Due to my ignorance, for the
textures to (almost) work, I ended up jacking up almost all of the radiosity
values to near their highest quality (except recursion_limit, which is 2), and
the scene took about forever to render.

With that said, I don't think I was fully successful telling this story, but I
learned a few things, which is almost as good.

~Waggy

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