Spent many hours today looking into light. How they work, how they behave. The more I've read and experimented the less I understand. I promise I will never ever laugh again when someone introduces themselves as light designers. Of course I've only met the decorator types

I spent extra time on trying to grasp the basics of the Hollywood way of doing lighting. The three-point lights (Key, front and backlight). It's a great concept if you want to look into this further. Well worth reading up on.

To make a short story long: I've been struggling with the fog and how to light it. So far everything has looked like there's a big police helicopter in the air chasing zombies on the ground with their search spotlight. Terrible.

Anyways, I closed Maya feeling very discouraged and intimidated by light, and it felt like the score between Matt vs Lighting: 1 - 10.
Went to play some Quake 3 to let off some 'steam' and booom: This idea came to me. What if I connect a 3D cloud texture to the color input of the volume shader. Woaaah instant mass and volume, and I can control the contrast and transparency with the 3D cloud. Here's the result:

Next on the todo list is look into render layers and passes, so I can tweak the fog without having to wait 5-7 minutes for my slow comp to re-render it all. 37 degrees celsius in the morning, had a good day