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Chapter 20: Using Lights and Basic Lighting Techniques

General parameters
The Light Type drop-down list in the General Parameters rollout lets you change the type of light instantly,
so that you can switch from Omni light to Spotlight with little effort. You can also switch between targeted
and untargeted lights. To the right of the Targeted option is the distance in scene units between the light
and the target. This feature provides an easy way to look at the results of using a different type of light.
When you change the type of light, you lose the settings for the previous light.
The General Parameters rollout also includes some settings for shadows. Shadows can be easily turned on
or off. In this rollout, you can defer to the global settings by selecting the Use Global Settings option. This
option helps to maintain consistent settings across several lights. It applies the same settings to all lights, so
that changing the value for one light changes that same value for all lights that have this option selected.
You can also select from a drop-down list whether the shadows are created using Area Shadows, a Shadow
Map, regular or advanced raytraced shadows, or a mental ray shadow map. A new rollout appears, depend-
ing on the selection that you make.
The Exclude button opens the Exclude/Include dialog box, where you can select objects to be included or
excluded from illumination and/or shadows. The pane on the left includes a list of all the current objects in
the scene. To exclude objects from being lit, select the Exclude option, select the objects to be excluded
from the pane on the left, and click the double-arrow icon pointing to the right to move the objects to the
pane on the right.
Figure 20.8 shows the Exclude/Include dialog box. This dialog box also recognizes any Selection Sets that
you’ve previously defined. You select them from the Selection Sets drop-down list.

FIGURE 20.8
The Exclude/Include dialog box lets you set which objects are excluded or included from being illuminated.

As an example of the Exclude/Include feature, Figure 20.9 shows the elk model with the antlers (left) and
its body (right) excluded from the shadows pass.

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