The fundamentals of lighting in 3D graphics
To begin, let's start with the fundamentals of what lighting is in 3D computer graphics.
What is lighting in 3D graphics? It is the use of computer graphic techniques to simulate real-world lights inside a virtual 3D world.
What do we mean when we say we are lighting a scene? Lighting is the act of creating, placing, and editing lights in your scene to create the mood or visual style that you are after.
Lighting helps to convey a story in an image or movie. Lighting can be used to separate your subject, foreground, and background elements in a scene. The lighting in 3D movies can also be animated, which opens up new possibilities. For example, you could use animated lights to change the focus from one subject to another in a 3D movie.
Realistic and stylized lighting
Lighting can be realistic or stylized. Think of all the stylized lighting examples in the 3D animated movies from Pixar or DreamWorks, where style and mood...