Home arrow Tutorials arrow 3. Adding Lights and Outliner Control Tutorial
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3. Adding Lights and Outliner Control Tutorial

In this tutorial, you will learn about how to add lights to a scene, and use the [outliner] to management them. (This tutorial assumes that a scene is already created.)

1. Adding lights

If your scene seems under-lit, better add some more lights to the scene. Right click in space or press [Space] when nothing is selected to open up the generic radial menu again and left click [add light] this time.

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Three types of lights are available:

  • Point light – light emitted from a single point, like what you would expect from candles.

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  • Spot light – lights up only a targeted area, the lit area is bigger as it's further from light, like a torch or stage light.

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  • Directional light – a huge light source that uniformly lit up the scene, doesn't care about distance from light source, only direction matters, like the sun.

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Add one of each light into the scene and see how they affect your scene. Move the lights with the [widget] as you would with moving characters and props.

Note:

  • When you grab the lights with either [G] or the purple pyramid in [widget], the lights do not clamp to the terrain, this is because we think lights are almost always above the ground.

  • At the moment, point lights do not cast shadows, while the other two do.

2. Managing a scene with outliner

Now you have a few objects in the scene, you might not be able to keep track of where each one is, so this is where an [outliner] is useful. Open the generic radial menu, left click to select the [outliner].

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The outliner has conveniently divided your objects in the scene into three groups: [characters], [props] and [lights], and you can select the object by left clicking its name tag. Double-click the name tag to rename the item to your liking. There are four icons beside each name tag, from left to right they are:

  • [crosshair] – left click on the [crosshair] to let the camera centre on the object, similar to pressing the [F] key.

  • [pointer] – left click on the [pointer] to toggle the object to be selectable/unselectable. This is quite useful if you populate a scene with props only as background, like a forest. You would make the trees unselectable after you've lined them up so you don't select them by accident during filming.

  • [eye] – left click to toggle visible/hide. For lights, it turn on/off the light.

  • [coloured circle] – left click to open a colour picker to change primary colour of the object. For character, it changes the skin colour; for props, it changes the primary colour; for light, it changes the light colour.

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Tip: to get help messages for [Outliner] GUI, click [Help] at the tool bar on top of the scene window and check [Show Floating Tooltips in UI].

To remove objects from the scene, select the desired object, then press [Delete]. This works both in the scene and in [Outliner].

Save the scene after you have arranged it properly and given it a unique look.

 
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 29 April 2008 )
 
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