Capturing the Brilliance of Light is the second commercial tutorial from Dax at QuadSpinner consists of two main parts. The first half is a look through the terrain editor while the second moves on to cover several short projects that illustrate different types of outdoor lighting.
The first part is a detailed, 35 minutes look thorough Vue’s atmosphere editor tabs that influence a scene’s lighting when working with a spectral model atmosphere. Dax works through the different control illustrating their influence on a scene using a simple Vue terrain. In the second part Dax moves on to the first of his projects in which he look at lighting an early morning scene. The second project covers lighting a cave or sink hole looking in from outside while the third covers lighting a sea cave with a watery interior. Finally Dax examines the tricky art of producing Godrays with two different scenes.
Alongside the systematic coverage of the tools and step by step projects there are some useful tips on using Vue 7 to achieve realistic lighting. Dax focuses on creating realistic skies which are sometimes, as in the case of god rays, dramatic but also sometimes preferring to create less dramatic, more mundane lighting in order to create a more realistic, and so ultimately, believable image.
The video is sixty-seven minutes long. It doesn’t suffer from long pauses for renders or covering mundane tasks unrelated to achieving the tasks covered. This is an issue that plagues some video tutorials I’ve seen and I’m thankful it isn’t an issue with any of the makers of Vue’s video tutorials. The video is an easy to watch 1280pc by 800px and the quality of the audio is good. Dax has a good, clear speaking voice which remains easy to listen to and follow throughout. Again, thankfully unlike some training videos I’ve watched recently, the curse of a monotonous, dull delivery did not threaten to bore me to sleep within the first five minutes because of this the odd um, eh and ah are entirely forgivable and add a human quality to the voiceover.
Overall a very good video tutorial which provides detailed coverage of the atmosphere editor and some useful projects.
