White ground with shadows?

[MacDude]

How do you set up a completely white environment but still have shadows for nice character radiosity renders?

I know lightwave VERY well (I started using v3.5 on an Amiga) but this eludes me!!!

Thanks

[mamurphy]

Create a flat plane for a "floor".
Make the surface white.
Put your object on the "Floor".
Send to Layout...

In layout set your backdrop to white.
Turn off all lights.
Turn on radiosity.
Set your radiosity to "backdrop" so it uses the white backdrop to illuminate the object.

Hit F9.

White environment with shadows from the object should appear in the render view.

Hope that helps.

[mamurphy]

Also, you can check out this link. A little different, but same results.

http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/rendering/globalillumination_skydome/globalillumination_skydome.html

Cheers

[MacDude]

Will the ground be completly white 255 255 255? Not at a lightwave machine at the mo so I can't test it out.

I'll give it a try.

Thanks

[mamurphy]

You can use the LW color picker and select the white furthest right on the little grayscale picker.

Or you can use 255,255,255. It's up to you.

The level of white will determine how bright everything is.

You can play with the levels, but if you are going for the white environment I would suggest pure white.

[Avebeno]

How about setting the surface of the floor with a difussion level of 150 - 200% If you only allow the main light souce to illuminate the floor with a shadow cast, it might do the trick.

[wacom]

There is a much simpler way. Just go into the advanced tab of any surface you want to recieve shadows but get masked out, such as the floor surface, and make the alpha channel use Shadow density. When you render out it will look the same, but you're alpha will take out the floor surface and leave you with your other objects and shadows. Then all you need to do is make a white background.

easy as 123.

[MacDude]

Thanks for the input guys.

I'll experiment a bit more with you're sugestions.

mamurphy, obviously I can make the ground object white but I wanted it to render totally white with shadows.

wacom, I've never used Shadow Density before, would that involve post processing? I can do that [post processing] but I didn't really want to.

Thanks again.

[mamurphy]

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear.

When you use backdrop radiosity it will cause shadows to be cast.

That's why you need the ground plane (to catch the shadows from the object).

Just make sure you turn off all other lights.

*Edit* That's odd. I just ran my scene and didn't have any shadows either. Let me run some tests to see what the issue might be. *edit*

I will try to post an image in just a minute.

[mamurphy]

Here is a sample render. Its the radiosity things benchmark file in the LW content folder.
You can probably reverse engineer the scene to work for you.

[mamurphy]

Here's an example of a different object in the scene....

[saburi]

wacom's method will only work with raytraced shadows. Won't work with Raydiosity:(
Skydome with white floor works fine.

[UnCommonGrafx]

ShadowBlatt from Prem'll do it.
http://premdesign.com
There's a sale there on stuff, too.

[MacDude]

mamurphy, Thats exactly it! :D Just what I wanted.
I'll check the example scene file out.

Thanks again. (to you all for the input)