Hi all. As some of you will know, my lighting and rendering has never been very good. I always kinda belonged to that 'switch on physical sun and sky and make it look good' camp. Along with rigging and animation, lighting and rendering has been one of those areas I've just never got my teeth stuck into.

Until recently.

Here is the result of the first couple of weeks work on the lighting and rendering course I have been doing. So far have learned alot about different shadow settings, learned a few extra things I didnt know before about aiming spotlights and playing with settings such as the 'barn doors' effect, about the relevance of the emit diffuse, emit specular functions etc, and quite a few other things besides. We have been given different set ups to light, the one in the picture below being the most recent. This image was composed of a keylight pass, a fill light pass, and an AO pass. Comped in PS with the key light 'bloomed' back over the top.

Moving onto FG and GI proccesses next. Hope to post more stuff from my learning over the next few weeks.