CGTalk - Sky light spec

FhdeVilliers

11-19-2009, 09:32 AM

I have noticed that in real life when you look at shadows there is always a reflection of the sky on grass and so on. So in cg you would need a blue diff light to fill the shadows and a blue specular light to get some nice highlights of the sky reflection. Im using a simular approach to Pigeon Impossible (multi pass lighting). I have a series of infinate lights pointing in all directions to give a nice even ambient light from the sky, but the spec component is still missing as you cant use the spec from these lights as it just makes a bunch of spots on the object. Any ideas for a specular rig?

burgess3D

11-19-2009, 01:58 PM

Hi FhdeVilliers,

You could try enabling spec contribution for just your key light (most likely your sun source). If that's not enough you could try cheating another light or two to get more interesting specular highlights.

Good luck!

soulburn3d

11-19-2009, 03:02 PM

Since the specular you're seeing is just the reflection of the sky showing on reflective surfaces, have you considered not using a specular light (which probably won't give you good results) and instead using either real raytraced reflections or the reflection of an environment map?

- Neil

musashidan

11-20-2009, 12:24 AM

In the vein of Neil's advice.I always turn off the spec component of my lights and use ray traced environment spec reflections.There's really no need to use fake simulated spec from a lightsource in most cases.

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