LIGHTS AND CAMERAS

XSI provides a complete set of lighting tools (including indirect lighting) and physically accurate cameras for producing amazing looking shots out of the box.

LIGHTS AND SHADOWS

Bring your scenes to life with five types of light—including standard point, spot and infinite (directional) lights—with full control over light color, intensity, falloff, and other parameters. Manipulators let you interactively adjust spotlight cone angles and spread directly in the viewports. You can even position your spotlights by looking through them. Selective lighting options give you precise control over which lights affect which objects.

The difference between XSI lighting and other 3D applications is the amount of control that you have over lighting and the tight integration with rendering (mental ray by default). You can tweak and adjust more parameters in XSI than any other 3D application (and animate those parameters too). As you make changes in lighting, you can also see these changes update interactively in the render region.

A variety of manipulators and display options, coupled with the ability to look through directional lights makes positioning lights in XSI easy. Download video - right-click and save as...

XSI also gives you full control over shadows, so you can define which lights create shadows, which objects cast shadows and which objects receive them. XSI supports fully raytraced shadows, as well as shadow maps, and volumic shadow maps for rendering hair. For soft shadows, you can add rectangular, spherical, cylindrical, or disc-shaped area lights.

All XSI lights are shader-based, so you can open them in the render tree and extend lighting effects using the full XSI shader library. You can also take advantage of a library of light effects including flares, glows volumic lighting, ambient occlusion and subsurface scattering.

Shading effects like subsurface scattering add realism the lighting of your scene by simulating the way real-world objects react to light. Download video - right-click and save as...

Photoreal Photon Lighting & Final Gathering

XSI’s photon lighting tools let you capture the way light behaves in the real world, with photoreal results. Turn your scene lights into photon emitters and use global illumination to simulate the way colors bleed onto surrounding surfaces under bright light. Then set up caustics to create the hotspots you see when light bounces around reflective and refractive surfaces like glass and water.

Final gathering gives you another way to calculate indirect lighting by sampling nearby surfaces to determine how object colors affect one another. You can use final gathering to turn objects into light sources that act like bounce cards, or use it together with global illumination and caustics to pick up the tiny details that add that last touch of realism to your lighting.

Image Based Lighting

XSI’s Environment shader lets you create image-based lighting using Final Gathering and a source-image. You can set it up in a render pass to light an entire scene, or limit the effect to specific objects. The environment shader supports spherical, cylindrical, and cubic mapping for a variety of High Dynamic Range image formats, including OpenEXR for truly photorealistic lighting.

If you’re looking for a less computationally intensive alternative, use XSI’s Light Rig to recreate the lighting conditions in a HDR source image using an array of standard lights that you can adjust individually, or in groups.

CAMERAS

Capture your creations using any number of perspective, telephoto, wide-angle, or orthographic cameras. XSI’s cameras support popular NTSC, PAL, HDTV, Cine, and Slide camera formats, with easy-to-use controls for field of view and clipping planes. Projection plane setup options help you match your virtual cameras to real world cameras by setting aperture and focal-length measurements, and control horizontal and vertical lens shifts.

Quick access to properties helps you set up your cameras quickly. Download video - right-click and save as...

The default 3-point camera rig system gives you tremendous flexibility for animating your cameras, which, like everything in XSI, are animatable down to the last parameter.

Lens Shaders

Lens shader let you create a variety of camera effects ranging from flares and blurs, to drawing cartoon ink lines, to emulating real-world cameras and creating depth of field. As with other XSI shaders, you can extend lens shaders in the render tree using the entire XSI shader library.

Camera Projections

Widely used in feature-length anime and other toon-style productions, camera projections offer a convenient way to texture backgrounds and environments. By projecting a photographic, or hand-drawn background onto relatively simple geometry, from the point of view of a camera, you can create highly detailed environments without having to build and texture complex geometry.

From simple backplates to more complex flythroughs like the one in this example, camera projections are a quick and easy way of creating an environment using simple geometry and image textures. Download video - right-click and save as...