Bryce Lighting Tips:
If you’ve played around with Bryce a bit, you probably already realized that it has global lighting. In fact, it works very similar to the sun in the real world. It’s not exactly the same but you have the ability to move it around in the sky as well as change things to a night time scene. It makes it fairly easy to light your scene.
If you look at the first image on the left, you would probably agree that the lighting is pretty decent. Shadows seem to be playing nicely and the entire scene is fairy bright. In most cases, this is what you’re probably shooting for when putting together a panel for your comic. Unfortunately, things aren’t always so easy.
In the second image, I moved the sun around a bit to give the scene a different atmosphere. Unfortunately this gives our Emotiguy a ton of shadows and this may not be what you want. Personally, I think it would look better if he was a bit more lit up and that’s not too difficult to do.
In the third image, our Emotiguy has better lighting and we were able to keep the sun in the same place from image two. All I did was add a spotlight and put it in front of him. There are some settings that you’ll need to keep in mind when using this method. Since we don’t want to have the illusion that there is another light source, we’ll need to click on the ‘E’ while highlighting our spotlight. This will take you into the Light Lab.
The first setting you should change is ‘Cast Shadows’. Turning this off will remove any shadows that the spotlight would normally cast. Next, you should add a bit of ‘Edge Softness’ but keep the value fairly low. Probably somewhere between 10-20. The last setting you’ll want to change is intensity and this should also be a fairly low value but you’ll have to experiment with it until you find what looks best.
This technique doesn’t have to be done with the spotlight. You really could use any of the light sources depending on the situation you’re in. It may take some practice to have the added lighting look natural. If your scene looks like it has multiple lighting sources, then you may need to go back and tweak things.
