Day 8 - Light Objects

Light Objects

I started on the light object topic and learned about the different functions for the lights. For example, shadow bias can control how the shadow is casted and how does it look. If the value is negative, it will render out to look like the shadow is casted in front of the object. However, the shadow bias value cannot be too high as it will make the shadow look weird. But it's good when we are casting shadow for far objects.

Basically I think that the the shadow functions in Houdini is quite similar to Maya. Both of them has depth map shadow and ray-traced shadow. But depth map shadow can have more control in what kind of shadow we want to cast. I've also learned a very interesting way to light up an object and I've taken note down about how to do it.

Add an environment light that shines through geometry you select only.
Create an environment light
Create a sphere, change it from Primitives to Polygon Mesh
Environment light > Render Options > Portal Geometry > /obj/sphere

I felt that this look like three point lighting too.