Lighting the Bat Creature

For the Bat Creature, I wanted dramatic lighting to make the character look dangerous and foreboding. I needed some dark shadows and stark lighting that wouldn’t give too much away. To create this effect, I used a three-point lighting setup, which is commonly used to light characters and portraits. Additionally, I needed to set up my lights to create good shadows with the creature’s hair and to light the creature from behind so that light would be seen scattering through the skin of the wings (using the subsurface scattering material we created in Chapter 12).

Turning on Sample as Lamp for backgrounds with texture information speeds up reduction of noise while rendering. Here, an HDRI map has been used to light the scene. Left: Sample as Lamp turned off (30 passes). Right: Sample as Lamp turned on with map resolution set to 256 (again, after 30 passes).
Figure 13-10. Turning on Sample as Lamp for backgrounds with ...

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