Spotlight rotation and position play roles in
your scene. A spotlight??™s shadows can be either hard or soft with shadow mapping.
?—? Linear lights. You can use linear lights as elongated light sources, such as fluorescent
bulbs and neon tubes. Linear lights can have realistic shadows but consume
additional rendering time.
Inside LightWave v9 142
Chapter 4 Lighting 143
?—? Area lights. The best choice for creating true shadows, area lights create a brighter,
more diffuse light than distant lights and therefore result in greater realism. They
do, however, take longer to render than spotlights, distant lights, or point lights.
Note
The environment in which your animation lives is crucial to the animation itself, which
is why we dedicate a chapter to lighting and textures. You should consider color, intensity,
and ambient light each time you set up a scene. Too often, tutorials overlook the
power of light, but you know better! Using light, along with shadows, as elements in your
animation can be as important as the models and motions you create. As you work
through setting up lights in your 3D scenes, you should get used to setting one variable
in particular: light intensity, also called brightness.
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