Lights

In real world environments light sources affect the appearance of objects and define their shapes. solidThinking allows you to reproduce these effects. Just as in a photographic set, you can position and control an unlimited number of light sources.

solidThinking handles light sources by treating them as shaders, which have positions, intensities, and other properties, such as directions, colors, etc. And just like any other shader, each light source has parameters that can be edited.

During the shading of an object, light source shaders are accessed to find the intensity, color, and angle of incidence of light from each source, which, along with the color, texture, reflectance component, etc., of the object, can be used to establish its appearance at a particular point.

This lighting method offers you enormous advantages compared to any other method, giving you the flexibility to modify illumination of the scene very quickly and precisely.

In solidThinking, light sources are not modeled in a physically-based manner. For example, intensities are given by using arbitrary units that do not directly relate to the power output of a lamp, or any other such physical measurement. A physically accurate simulation of lighting conditions can be achieved when using the Radiosity Processor Module: in fact, the role of the shaded rendering engine is intended only to generate shaded images that look realistic.

By default the scene is illuminated by a single eye light.

See also:

• Light Source Types.

• New Light (how to add a new light to the scene).

• Assigning a Light Shader.

• Saving Light Settings.

• Editing Light Settings.

• Creating Shadows.

• Controlling Shadows Production for each Object.