A few years ago, my local science museum had a temporary gallery allowing visitors to test interactive stations for an upcoming Pixar exhibit. One let guests move different knobs to change the placement and color of light in a model scene, showing how a simple lighting change affects the appearance and mood of a scene in a movie. As chapter 11 of Designing Immersive 3D Experiences focuses on lighting and color in XR, it reminded me of that exhibit concept, and how important lighting is in any media-based project.
XR experiences must have their lighting programmed in order for the experience to be legible and visually appealing. Applications like Unreal Engine allow users to add various types of lights to a scene, such as spotlights, Ambient light, Point light, Area light, and others. These lights process color in RGB (red, green, blue) format, where different combinations of all three colors combine to form many different shades. Modeling programs also allow control of the placement, intensity, and depth of light and shadows in a scene, and allow users to animate light changes using keyframes. Some AR applications also have sensors and programming that sense how bright or dark the environment around the user is, and use lighting estimation to automatically adjust the brightness or darkness of the application to contrast with it.
The exercise this time is to create a basic sphere in Adobe Dimension and light it in different ways to see how changes in lighting affect the model’s appearance. My sphere is shown with a point light, three point lighting, sunlight, backlight, and my custom setup of highly diffused pink light. I’ve also been practicing modeling with Unreal Engine 5, and plan to put some simple models and animations up on the website in the near future. Next week I’ll jump into sound design for XR.
Sources:
Chan, Kenneth. “First Look at Disney’s Science Behind Pixar Exhibit at Science World.” Daily Hive, May 19th, 2018, https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/science-behind-pixar-science-world-vancouver-2018-disney
“Lighting.” The Science Behind Pixar, Museum of Science, Boston, https://sciencebehindpixar.org/pipeline/lighting
Stevens, Renee. Designing Immersive 3D Experiences. Pearson Education Inc., 2022, pp 275-300.