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Hello there,

If you are here today on the other end of the cyberspace and reading this I hope this is an interesting process for us both.

I have been a 3d lighting enthusiast for a while and still I am, mostly in the world of computer graphics light and accurate light is about the most important element, yes this may be my opinion for now or maybe I have a few who share my opinion however I am sure you will understand this as we go along.

(NB) To a large extent there is an assumption that most readers have an idea or are involved in the CG world already and as such we may not go into certain details but no reason to worry much, all you will find here are simple language... initially

LIGHTING IS IMPORTANT

The 3d space is one which is similar to the scenario depicted in creation, now this is nothing to flare up about either you believe in creationism or evolutionism or whatever else superman must have brought to life, this is simply an analogy for representation and clarity purposes.

So yeah, it is recorded that when the world was created by God (or Superman)... everything remained in a total state or anarchy and chaos, although these elements were in space and they were perfectly made to fit and of course they have their 2, 3 or 4 dimensions meaning they had various levels of depth, shape and mass to them ermmm basically a 3d scene, space or environment whichever one works well for you.

The lighting importance is seen when the creator said as recorded ''Let their be light'' and the result was an immediate solution to the darkness and mix up that abound, because light showed up on the scene and there was a sense of direction and motivation, this idea of lighting up a scene either by saying it or as we know it by 'creating' light in any 3d application can be further understood in the practice that every 3d application used by any industry always have a default light setup in the scene once you open the modelling platform, I might add that in the case of Lightwave 3d there is a layout platform where the modelled components are transferred in order for it to be light up and rendered out if needed but there also there is a default lighting setup, however most other applications combine these into one platform rather than two.

Usually and this is best practice for a 3d artist to always delete or turn off their scene's default light on or before their model is finished and then create their own lighting setup, except in a case of quick render to view and proceed with work then an artist may chose to leave the default light.

One other default creation is the camera but this is not usually deleted more are added to it instead.

The question is, why would the 3d application makers not simply allow you model and then create your light when you want it, do they always have to give you a default light?

The answer is suggested already in a few lines above, without any sense of light a modeller would modeller would not be able to see the models with the eye of the camera which is the real eyes of the 3d environment.

When the scene has no default light, yes you can model a lovely scene and with nice super textures etc (all these cans be seen with the normal eye, just like you are drawing with the pencil on paper) however in order to see it in the 3 dimensional composition you need the scene eyes which is the scene default camera position therefore unless you create your own light setup which is not always immediately necessary to do, you cannot have any sense of direction for your model as you would not be able to see (camera view) in the dark (scene without light), this goes also to animating, all of these could be done so nicely but when its time to view from the scene eyes you would not see any detail, at best a silhouette figure moving around in your shot.

In conclusion, I like to mention that my interest in lighting is not isolated from the traditional and natural use of lights and I hope the budding artist can understand the essence and need to study and understand light not just for its illuminative importance but also for the various properties and characteristics that light has like temperature, mood, velocity, strength or intensity, reflectivity to mention just a few and this is why setting up a 3d scene depicting darkness does not mean there would be little or no light at all, it means you must understand the characteristics of light in a night environment and try to apply these to your scene to get the near realistic results.