(Press your Back Button to return to this page after viewing images from thumbnails below.)
 

Exterior lighting is something we have less experience with in general, so it stands to reason we may have less familiarity with the concept when we try to create a digital scene using outdoor lighting, particularly for night scenes.

The following is a tutorial on the lighting of an outdoor scene of mine. The scene itself is one I had dreamed of for quite awhile, a scene taking all my individual Bryce custom trees and using them together as bonsai trees in one bonsai garden collection.

To see the full scene in larger format, click on the Thumbnail above. I've also included a day scene, and while it doesn't have anything to do with the tutorial, it just lets you see the same scene in daylight lighting (in case you're interested), because I find the day/night comparisons of a scene interesting and I'm assuming some of you will share that interest.

The tutorial assumes you have the basic Bryce lighting use skills already, so you know about setting intensity, changing from linear falloff to squared falloff, etc. If not, review those elements in your user guide.

The scene itself and the wireframe layout of it is shown in Intro Panel , where introductory notes about the lighting concept are described.

The patio foreground lighting is illustrated in Panel #1

The patio accent lights are illustrated in Panel #2

The background lights and moonlight are illustrated in Panel #3

I've usually described if a light is set at squared falloff or linear falloff, but I didn't describe the light intensities. This is because this scene is actually "huge" in terms of Bryce sizes (huge in dimensions, not data size), and light intensities are affected by distance in Bryce units, so my "huge" scene required light intensities from 150 to 750 to carry the great distances in my big scene. Most scenes use lights set anywhere from 10 to 150. So my numbers would probably not make sense in any scenes you might be doing.

Also, ultimately, you set intensities relative to other lights. So once you start lighting parts of a scene, you set the intensities of the rest of the lights according to what looks balanced, brighter or dimmer than the other lights you have, based on your vision of what should be brighter or darker.

Remember that the number of lights you use affects your render time, because the ray tracing process calculates the pixel color by drawing rays back to each light source. So the more sources you have, the more rays needing to be traced, and that means more render time. But if you are familiar with my work, you've seen how I continually do scenes with 20 to 70 lights. Yes, my renders go slow, but I focus on the results, not the time it takes. I encourage you to think the same way. Quality takes time, and there is a visual quality the multiple lights give which simply cannot be attained with two or three lights.