Original subtitles

So we have added a really prominent hard light into the mix which was meant as an accent

light, now we need to use some kind of a light blocker or light gobo to really turn it into a

light pool or light puddle, we just need to drag the viewer's eye into a certain portion of the

image to create a bunch of pools of light, that is what we need. so let's create something that would

block the light, a plane for example, I'm scaling it in such way so it can block a portion of the

light coming in from the sun and just in case, you know, to avoid the unnecessary light spill

or rather light bounce, I'm creating a new material and assigning a black color to it.

also zeroing out this specular component just in case

S to make it bigger, G to move... what I'm trying to do here is constrain the area of effect

or the area of influence of the sun lamp so it turns into a little stream of light...

trying to find the right placement of the blocker, Shift D to duplicate it and move it

over to the right side to leave a really small opening in between these two blockers, now we

can move the this entire construction around to effectively shift the position of the light beam.

I'm trying to avoid this beam touching the main mineral, I want it to be super soft, illuminated

just with our key light and in order to further tweak the shape of the opening I'm using Shift D

shortcut to duplicate the blocker once again, you can see how moving around affects the shape of the beam,

now the stroke looks alright, we can add some light texture to it. now I'm going to simulate

what is called a light gobo or light cutout. this plane will serve as a base, I'm

tabbing into the edit mode, creating a bunch of subdivisions with the help of the Ctrl R shortcut,

then selecting everything will help the A shortcut, right click and subdivide

everything a few times until the wireframe becomes fairly dense, something like that.

Ctrl Space to escape from the full screen mode and then head over to the modifiers tab

and select the decimate modifier. I'm going to use a fairly obscure way of rotating the geometry, so

I'm selecting the unsubdivide mode and upping the iterations to 1. now we can see that the geometry

got rotated by 45 degrees I believe, um... yeah 45 degrees, right :) now it's just a matter of throwing

in the wireframe modifier and adjusting its thickness. we have effectively created the light

gobo and we can play with the light texture by adjusting the size of it. it's not super intuitive

but we can also control the harshness of the shadows by moving this object closer or further

away from the light or I should have said... closer or further wave in relationship to our subject.

aside from purely aesthetic function of breaking up the light beam... uh... these light gobo serves

the purpose of hinting at the environment, is it some decorative part of the blinds that is

throwing such shadow... it tells something about the environment itself. I'm placing these objects

into the sun blockers collection just to keep things organized and so this is our accent light,

a stroke of compositional interest and a puddle of light at a higher intensity.

there was nice and soft window somewhere, now there is a sunbeam striking through. awesome! generally

speaking one of the functions of lighting is to tell more about the setting, about the environment,

the lighting choices you make help to hint at the environment properties and to ground

your set into some kind of an ambient narrative. such details as the light beams cut it through

the leaves and hitting the table, the window shades, the color temperature even, all of those hints help

to motivate our lighting setup and to ground it even though we don't see the environment directly.