21 - Monastery of Realisminites and its vicinities [Pixie]

[Redrobes]

Yeah I do mine in 3D to save myself the headache ! More work up front, less for doing any shadows at all.

There are two things to consider withshading and shadows in that a) if you zoom right in on a few cm's of roof then it has no idea about whats going on at another point of the roof. So what applies to shading on one part of the roof is not dependent on the shape of the whole roof, only the shape of that little bit of it. So its all about the angle of the roof to the sun. For shadows, a flat plane is either all in shadow or not. Kudos to anyone who wants to hand shadow those curved far eastern temple roofs tho...

Having said that then there is b) You can get secondary reflections off of walls. So where you have a tower with a roof under it then the walls of the tower will cast a glow onto the roof or into a shadow zone. That sort of thing happens all over stuff on the earth but you get super hard shadows on space ships etc where that doesn't happen. A shadow in space is often very black. Now Falconius has some good rendering going on since he has used this ray tracing thing so you can see those secondary highlights on his renders which is why it looks jolly real.

Lighting is quite hard to do really accurately. But the basics of it are quite simple. But its something a computer can do for you if you tell it what its about in 3D. Its worth the effort.