As I mentioned previously, setting lights in PhotoWorks still seems tricky to me.  You can usually get by just using the light schemes pre-set in each scene, but if you want to add a special effect or get the shadow and shapes of objects just right, then you usually need to work with lights. SolidWorks has different kinds of lights available to customize and “play” with. There’s the ambient light, directional lights, point lights, spot lights… I’ve been playing a bit with point lights, trying to set something that may look a bit like holiday lights.

This is a simple assembly of several instances of one same light, such as this one.

After arranging the lights in the way I want them to go, comes the fun part of setting lights. But before that, I selected a scene for my rendering. I wanted something dark, to make the lights more obvious, so I chose Reflective Floor Black from the scene editor. You can access this scene editor by right clicking the scene folder in the PhotoWorks tab or by clicking on the scene icon in the PhotoWorks toolbar.

I made a few modifications to this scene, however, that will affect the lighting and reflections in the rendered image. For instance, in the Room tab of the Scene Editor, I changed the floor to Dark Room Floor, with no reflections, and used a gradient from black to dark gray as a background in the Back/Foreground tab.

And now, let’s work on those lights! Notice that there are already a couple of directional lights listed under Lights, Cameras and Scene. If you right click the folder in the feature manager, and select Show Lights, you will be able to see their exact location in the graphics area. In my case, the colorful dots are the point lights I added to my assembly and the other two that seem to be floating in the air are directional 1 and directional 2. These are similar to the lights in a photo studio that aim at the subject from different sides and angles, in order to create or eliminate shadows and define shapes.  They can be modified to change their location, color and brightness, for instance. It is also possible to add more of these directional lights, as needed.

The point light, on the other hand doesn’t aim the light in any specific direction; it’s like a ball of light, shinning in all directions. This is what makes it perfect for what I had in mind. So, I added my first point light to one of the little light bulbs in the assembly, by right-clicking the Lights, Camera and Scene folder and then selecting Add Point Light from the menu.  I used the coordinates of the location of the center of the circular edge shown in the graphics area to define the position of my light. These coordinates, by the way, are very easy to obtain by using Measure. I modified a few properties of the point light, like its color, which I changed very easily by clicking on Edit Color in the property manager and picking a new one from the color palette. In this particular case, it was green.  I also changed the brightness of the light, moving the slider from 1 to 0.16, because holiday lights aren’t really that bright.

Next, I modified the PhotoWorks properties (switch to those by clicking on the button that says PhotoWorks properties at the top of the property manager). First of all, I made sure this light would be on in PhotoWorks.  I also selected Keep Light, so it won’t be lost in case I experiment with different scenes and backgrounds, and added a bit of fog light, since this “fog” is what will allow me to see the light and not only the shadows it makes. I just need a little bit, though, or else my rendering may end up looking like in this image, where the value was set to 0.8.

That’s why I set it to 0.015 instead.  It took me a bit of trial and error to figure out that I didn’t need that much!  The rest of the lights were added in the same way, changing the color of each to match that of the light bulb.  Just the right kind of rendering for the holiday season!

And speaking of renderings, have you visited Rob Rodriguez blog lately? He just posted the entries for the November rendering contest. I entered one myself, and I thought I was going to win for sure, until I saw the entries I was competing against. Now I don’t really think I have a chance, but it will be fun to see how many votes I can get this time around. Wow! Lots of great stuff in there! Go check them out and vote for your favorite today, because voting ends this Friday!