Physical accuracy takes the guesswork out of lighting

Lighting is key to photorealistic rendering and whilst most rendering engines offer a bounce approach to lighting with simple point lights, direction lights, spot lights, and controls such as colour and intensity, it is surprisingly difficult to get reasonable results unless you are a rendering expert and able to invest a good deal of time and effort for each image.

LightWorks includes both basic lighting and advanced, physically accurate lighting. The words 'advanced' and 'accurate' might suggest that they are harder to use but actually the opposite is true. LightWorks calculates all the lighting effects for you, guaranteeing realistic results every time.

Ease of use with LightWorks Advanced Lighting comes from three main areas:

Choosing Light Sources

With basic lighting you have to choose light sources to mimic the real world, specifying spotlights with cone angles for light fittings, directional lights for the sun and guessing suitable colours and intensities.

With LightWorks Advanced Lighting light sources can be specified using photometric data so you can choose your light source from catalogues of specific manufacturers fittings, specify the location, weather and time of day, or choose from a selection of HDRI environments.

Simulating Indirect Lighting

Basic lighting only calculates direct lighting but most scenes are at least partically lit by indirect lighting from the sky or surroundings. Experts can simulate indirect lighting by careful positioning of dummy light sources known as fill lights. Combining LightWorks Advanced Lighting and Global Illumination products means that realistic secondary illumination is calculated automatically.

Adjusting Light Levels

With basic lighting you have to adjust groups of lights in turn to get the right light levels and contrast within the scene, particularly difficult when using many fill lights.

LightWorks Advanced Lighting uses a technique called tone mapping to automatically adjust physically accurate light intensities so that they appear correct on standard computer displays, coping with very bright and very dark areas in a similar way to the human eye.

In the past, advanced light sources and global illumination have been slow, memory intesive, often inaccurate and difficult to control, but LightWorks 7.6 introduces new techniques which dramatically improve the performance, reliability and ease-of-use to offer a practical solution for accurate rendering.

Preview renders can be acheive in seconds rather than minutes and final renders in minutes rather than hours.

LightWorks customers can now offer their users a solution for photorealistic rendering that is both accurate and easy-to-use.