Lighting in Rhino
Tutorial

By loganarts

Rendered in Rhino

This tutorial will show you how to set up lighting in Rhino.

The basics:

• All buttons used in this tutorial will be listed in quotes "Like this".
• All menu items used in this tutorial will be listed as follows, If I wanted you to do a save, I would show it as follows, "File>Save".
• At the bottom of the screen there are 4 boxes, Snap, Ortho, Planar and Osnap. Remember where they are as we will use the often.
• Remember to use the zoom in and out "CTRL + Right mouse Drag up or down" and the drag view "Shift + Right mouse Drag to move". These tools will save you tons of time.
• If you double click on the view title it will go to full screen. I use this often.
• We will always work in the view pictured unless stated.

Pictured above is the lighting setup we will be making.

Ok Lets get started.
Start Rhino.

Create a sphere. The size does not matter.

Create a cube to be used as the floor and place it under the sphere.

Right click the render button, It will open the render options.
Adjust the ambient color and the background color to a very dark and blueish hue.

Create a light on the top of the sphere with a very open angle. This will be your main global light.

Now, I will tell you a very important thing for real lightting. In the real world you dont see pure colors, They are always
mixed with other colors. So every time you set a light color choose grayish red or blue...
I call this dirty colors. Here You will choose a grayish dark blue.

For this light set the softness to 20 it will give you smooth shadows and hightlights.

Render the perspective view. You will have something like this.

Now your going to need a back light. there is no rule for this light, but a back light is necessary to create a contrast in the object
and its cool too.

Here is another back light. This light gives a color envoirement
for your scene.

Here is a good trick to create a lighter spot inside anoder light
giving a special touch to your lighting.

As you can see, we are using cold lights only. lets warm things up a litlle bit.
Create another global light with a yellowish dark gray.

Lets create the highlights.Create a light with a blueish gray
coming from topfront.

Ctrl copy ctrl paste the light you just created and scale it smaller. Center the light and move forward some.

Create a light with a very close angle. Put the color hue a litlle lighter.

Thats it. I hope you enjoyed it.

Note: If you want to see the exact light colors and positions, check out this 3dm file.

Have fun and good luck.

See you in the Renderosity.com Rhino forum.

Spike