by Jonathan Adams
I am going to show you how to create a dome luxigon rig which will simulate a dome radiosity environment. Also I will use a modifier called link follower to help animate all the luxigon lights that you create. You could use this technique to create a very fast rendering realistic light set up and still be able to envelope the intensity or color of all the lights together.
1. First you will need to pick a model and create the dome which will hold the luxigons.
Open modeler and load your object. I am using a very simple table which I created.
2. Change your ball type to tesselation.
Using the Ball tool create a sphere around the object, which is much larger then what will be illuminated Don't end the tool yet. Open the numeric panel using the "n" key and change the type to Tessellation and change segments to 3. (This can be changed depending on how many lights you want.) Now end the tool by pressing enter
4. Make the ball flush with the floor.
Then using the point selection, highlight the last row of points on the bottom of the dome. Using the set value tool "v" set the Y value to zero.
5. Flip
Now flip the polygons so they face toward the object, using the "f" key.
6. Name
Now with the dome selected create a surface name for it, "q". Name it dome and set the color to black.
7. Add Luxigons
Now under the Setup tab press the add luxigons button and change the light type to spot. Nothing much will happen but you will see the effect in Layout.
8. Set up Master Light
Ok set up your camera in a good place. Move the default light outside of your dome and key it.
Under properties change the name of the light to Master, the light type to spot, intensity fall off to inverse distance, and envelope the light intensity. This is the only item that I want to animate but you could use this same idea for light color or any other item which can be enveloped.
9. Set up Follower Light
Clone the light using the "control c" and move it just to the side, key it.
Under properties change the name of Follower.
10. Set up Channel Follower
The next step will be to add the modifier to the channel you want to follow. Open the graph editor of the follower light intensity. Under the Modifiers tab click on add modifier and add channel follower.
11. Adding luxigons to the dome.
To create you luxigons for the dome, select the dome object. Under the Effects tab / additional / generics / convert luxigons. At the pop up window change the clone item to the light "Follower". There you go, Lightwave creates a light in the position of each polygon.
12. Setting up the lights
If you render right now you will notice that your image might be really bright or just really dark, depending on how big your dome is. So you will need to select all the lights in the dome and change their range. You can select all the lights by either going to the Scene editor and shift selecting or using the middle mouse button and dragging over all the lights. I am using a range of 545 mm. I have also change my shadows to shadow map and changed the map size to 1024. This will allow for a sharper shadow if I had used a more complex object. However if your computer does not have a large amount of RAM then you need to keep the size of the map down. If you go to big with your shadow map size your render will slow down considerably.
13. Conclusion
Now that everything is set up, you can key your master light for intensity and have all of your lights flicker or even set up multiple master lights for difference sections of luxigons. Luxigon lights are really nice for simulating global illumination with quick renders. They also can make very interesting effects. Also Channel Follower can be used on any channel which can be keyed.
