Soft Global Lighting in Bryce 5

Author: xalthorn

Tools Needed

• Bryce

For some people, the correct positioning and angling of the light source/s can be the most frustrating task in Bryce, especially when you just want to light the scene.

This tutorial shows you how to get soft global lighting without using a single light source.

Here I've put three spheres in the default scene and given them textures. One glass and two metal.

For this tutorial, I want to show the objects floating in mid air, bathed in a soft light. So, I'm going to need to remove the floor. Click on or otherwise select the default ground plane and delete it.

The main trick to this lighting effect is removing the atmosphere.

At the top of the screen, there are six images that control things like clouds, shadows and so on. The one on the left hand side has a drop arrow beneath it. Click on that and you will get the option to turn the atmosphere off.

Now we need to turn the sunlight off.

Go In the Sky Lab (select the 'Sky and Fog' option from the top of the screen and then click on the cloud and rainbow). In there, there are three areas, 'Sun and Moon', 'Cloud Cover' and 'Atmosphere'.

Because we've turned the atmosphere off completely, we don't need to worry about those settings. All we want to do is turn the sun light off. Just click on the 'Disable Sun Light' option and you're done.

Now that we've turned all the lights off, if we do a render, we'll see that there is still a light of sorts, but it's blue.

Now we've turned the atmosphere off, you'll see that the left hand image at the top of the screen has a blue bar at the bottom of it. Click on this bar and you will enter a colour selection screen where you can select whatever colour you like. I'll select white.

Now a final render and you'll get the effect I was aiming for.