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Lighting Dance in the Digital Age

Monday, November 1st, 2010

Most everyone I know would agree that the ideal way to light a work for live performance is to see at least one run through prior to hitting the stage. Even under very short schedules and tense conditions this one rule of thumb is typically met. Every so often you encounter a situation where, despite everyone’s best intentions, it is not possible for the lighting designer to see a live run prior to tech.

I am now in the midst of just such a situation.

Next week, I am lighting a dance festival. Due to a combination of scheduling issues I will be unable to see the pieces live before tech. Ten, even five, years ago this would have been a bit of a problem. I’ve done it, so I know it’s not impossible, but it sure is not easy. Fortunately, there have been a handful of technology advances which make this current situation, while less than optimal, not even approaching a disaster.

Let’s look at the old model first to see how this would have been done just a few years ago.

The pieces average around 10 or 15 minutes each with 45 minutes of tech per dance. This gives time to run each piece twice with notes in between runs. Prior to the run, I would have written a handful of placeholder cues ahead of the rehearsal. Then, when time came for the tech of a particular piece, we would have run it while I modify the placeholder cues as the dance happens. During the notes we would discuss my lighting approach and I would make any desired changes, give cue placements to the stage manager and run the piece a second time, further refining the cues.

Cueing of this model is unfortunately common in the dance world. While it is far from perfect, it works.

These days we have all manner of technology at our disposal to bring us closer to an ideal situation. In this case, each of the six companies will video a rehearsal of their piece, upload those videos to Youtube, and send me the URL. I will see the pieces, though small and digital, before we hit the stage.

While I will not be able to see the pieces live before the show, there are some discrete advantages to this model. By having the piece on video I can pause, rewind, and restart the piece. Thus instead of trusting my notes from a single pass, I can get more detailed information about the choreography.

This in no way should be a default substitute for seeing a piece live. While a good addition, and a fantastic solution to my current conundrum, there is nothing like seeing a live body move through space. Video, certainly rehearsal video, is incapable of capturing the nuance of relationship between dancers or the connection of a performer to their audience. What video is very good at is capturing the shape of a choreography.

It would be a shame if video became the default means of lighting dance or other live performances. Video, however, is an invaluable tool when schedules collide and disallow a lighting designer from seeing the work he is soon to light.

I once heard the line “Anybody can light a dance they’ve seen. The real trick is to light one you’ve never seen.” attributed to lighting designer Sara Linnie Slocum. It is with all thanks due to modern technology that I will not be putting that line to the test next week.

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Software Review – Renderworks 2011

Monday, October 25th, 2010

I have seen the new Cinema 4D rendering engine for Vectorworks mentioned in reviews as not much more than a bullet point. Yet the new rendering engine is leaps and bounds beyond what was previously called Renderworks that it is almost like a whole new piece of software and certainly deserving of an independent review. In fact, the system is now so robust that Nemetschek would do its customers a great service by adding a getting started guide just for Renderworks to go into better detail about the functionality of the system.

The new rendering engine is so much more powerful, in fact, that I ran into a few problems right off the bat. Nemetschek claims that their new engine is many times faster than the old one. Yet when I did a side by side Final Quality Renderworks test the new engine took much longer to produce its result. Curious I looked further into this and discovered that the actual image was much better quality and, in order to get a quality equivalent to the old FQR, I had to set everything in custom to “Low Quality” and turn off Ray Tracing. Then the engine was faster. In short, the only way to get a true apples to apples comparison is to put the new RW on its lowest settings and the old Renderworks on its highest settings.

What’s that Ray Tracing thing he mentioned?

That’s right, the new Renderworks adds Ray Tracing functionality, meaning you can set how many times an individual photon bounces off objects. This gives renderings a more natural quality as bounce light is included in the rendering of the final image. This does increase rendering time and can cause a simple scene to take a fair amount of time to render. But you definitely get what you pay for. A little more time for a much higher quality rendering is, in my opinion, worth the wait.

One of the first things I did with the new Renderworks was rerender my lighthouse drawing. Here is where I hit the first, and only real snag, in the new system. Because the rendering engine deals with light and textures in an entirely new manner, the old textures did not map properly. As such, I had to rebuild my textures from scratch. This will cause some users a bit of frustration during the initial upgrade, but the final results will be well worth it.


A side by side comparison of my rendering of the lighthouse in RW2010 and RW2011

As you can see from the above comparisons not only are the shadows softer and more true but the detail in the drafting is much clearer. I did not change any of the physical drafted objects for the rerender. Only lighting sources and textures were changed.

The new Renderworks allows the importation of HDR images from which lighting information can be extracted and used for lighting your 3D models. Several HDRIs are included with the basic RW package and the user can import their own as well. Not only can this be a quick way to mock up basic lighting conditions, it also allows for the creation of really nice looking white models.

Turning off Textures and Colors in the Custom RW palette and then turning off ambient light from the Lighting Options Palette, setting indirect lighting to one bounce and Environmental lighting to HDRI white can give results like this:


Whitemodel of my 3D drafting of a house built from shipping containers. HDRI Environmental lighting and one directional light source.

In addition to vastly improved lighting options, the texturing capabilities of Renderworks 2011 are significantly improved. While imports of older files will require a rebuild of the textures, the user should find this worth the effort. Not only are simple colored textures improved, but the bumpmapping is better as well. One thing that could use some improvement is the transparency function. I have yet to find a suitable combination of settings which give adequate results for something like a translucent fabric.

The ability to add Decals allows for greater dynamic range of rendering options as well. A decal is an image file placed on top of an object with another texture. This allows the user to put graffiti or a poster on a wall for example.

Emitter options allow the user to set a reference white color temperature for light emitting objects. This is useful in a number of ways, not the least of which is when creating a texture that emits light allowing one to approximate fluorescent tubes, video screens, or lit walls.

Along with the new and expanded tools in the lighting and texturing areas. The artistic Renderworks options are newly redesigned as well. Users who are familiar with the old functionality of the Artistic RW settings will need to adapt to the new system, but the options are robust and give interesting and useful options for rendering one’s drawings.

Obviously the new Renderworks Cinema 4D engine is primarily of interest to those users who draw in 3D regularly. However, given the improvements in the 3D drawing environment in Vectorworks 2011, I expect an increasing number of users to begin working in 3D and using the new rendering engine.


Quick 3D sketch with Background image and Decal. Background image courtesy SnaPsi

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An Adventure in Non-Standard Roof and Doors in Vectorworks

Monday, October 4th, 2010

I am in the midst of an interesting drafting project. A two story house built from 24′ shipping containers. The house is partly built. The containers are on stilts with several windows and doors cut out in various places. I am drafting the structure, as built, in 3D in order to begin work on the final design phase of finishing the interiors, designing roof decking, and other aspects to make this industrial structure into a functional live/work space. Last week I covered the walls and this week we will look at the roof and doors.

The roof presented an interesting challenge. While not corrugated like the walls, it does have quite a texture to it. 30 ovaloid ribs on the top give it a raised exterior and a raised interior. My intent with this drawing is to model every component accurately with regards to its real world geometry. This gives the benefit, over using texture based modeling, of having the interior design/remodel be as true to life in the model as possible.


The roof of a 24′ shipping container Rendered in Vectorworks 2011

Creating the roof geometry turned out to be a simple process once I wrapped my head around it. My first instinct was to make a rectangle 1/4″ thick and then 30 flat ovals 1″ thick and use the add surface tool. The problem with this, as was the issue with using wall recesses for the walls, is that it would leave the interior of the roofing flat when in reality the ribs create recessed areas inside.

The next solution proved to be the best one. I created the rectangle, as mentioned above, and then cut out holes the size of the base of the ribs. I then created 30 NURBS curves, the shape of the top of the ribs, 1″ above the rectangle. From there I used the loft tool to connect the now cut rectangle to the various NURBS. I now had the interior and exterior geometry modeled to give full texture. This way, should the ceiling be exposed in this, or a future remodel, the geometry and texture is built in to the piece and will not have to be redrawn.

The doors were complex in a different way than either the roof or the walls. While none of the elements were overly complicated on their own, there are simply a lot of them. The door itself is a double hung 4″ wide metal frame with corrugated metal panels inside the frame. Simple enough. The complexity came from the locking mechanism.


The doors of a 24′ shipping container Rendered in Vectorworks 2011

The locks are composed of two metal poles on each door with handles to rotate them. As they rotate, the hands on the top and bottom grab on and lock into the hands on the container frame itself. All of this was simple geometry, but again there were a lot of parts. Each handle was composed of several polygons, and the locking hands themselves were quite complicated shapes.

In addition to modeling all these interesting shapes, I had to make decisions about the degree of detail I was willing to go into. I wanted the locking mechanism themselves because that provides interesting possibilities when we get to determining paint colors on the exterior and choosing contrasting or complimentary colors for the locking system. But then there was the question of including hex bolts and other parts of the structure.

I made the decision, for now, to forgo that next level of detail. It will not impact design decisions or renderings. Should they prove to be useful later on I made the doors as symbols so it will simply be a matter of adjusting the symbol geometry in that one instance and the whole drawing gets updated.

One design idea is to remove one or more of the doors and replace it with a large glass wall. A quick replace symbol function will be a lot simpler if and when we reach that point in the process.

Now that the drafting is complete, I look forward to the design phase.

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An Adventure in Non-Standard Walls in Vectorworks

Monday, September 27th, 2010

I am in the midst of an interesting drafting project. A two story house built from shipping containers. The house is partly built. The containers are on stilts with several windows and doors cut out in various places. I am drafting the structure, as built, in 3D in order to begin work on the final design phase; finishing the interiors, designing roof decking, and other aspects to make this industrial structure into a functional live/work space.


A Matson Shipping container and my 3D model in OpenGL

The containers are 24′ Matson shipping containers, the kind you see on ships, trains, and trucks. They make for a nice building material as they are very structurally sound and can be stacked on top of one another several high. While they are a great construction material, they pose an interesting drafting problem. The walls, in order to provide for maximum structural integrity, are corrugated. This is easy enough to model in 3D; draw a polygon in the shape of the corrugation and extrude to the correct height. However, this solution does not allow for the use of plug-in objects like Doors and Windows.

For the parts of the structure that are already finished, it would be easy enough to cut a hole in the extrude and drop a window in place without recourse to the many features of plug-in objects. But for the walls that are as yet uncut, being able to quickly and easily play with the size and shape of windows and doors without recutting the extrude every time would make the design phase a lot more pleasurable. So I set out on my quest to solve this problem.


A view of the corrugated wall with a window as it is and as I want it to look in OpenGL

A grumble on Twitter was quickly answered by Kevin Lee Allen. His suggestion was to use the Convert Polyline to Object feature and turn my corrugated line into a wall. Sounds simple enough. Trouble is, the conversion created 212 walls, one starting at each corner of the corrugation. Because of this, plug-in objects were not behaving properly as they would not cut through all the walls they intersected with.

After trying a few more things on my own, including an exploration of wall styles, I emailed Jonathan Pickup. Jon offers a web based consulting service and within an hour of my email being sent was on a skype call with him showing me through a screen capture how to do wall recesses. By doing a wall recess I am able to draw a wall using the wall tool and give it the corrugated look that the containers have. We appeared good to go.

This process worked brilliantly save one small problem. While I could model one side of the wall perfectly, the other side remained flat. Numerous attempts to recess the other side of the wall resulted in various failures. I could get a wall that looked corrugated on both sides, but the thickness of the wall would have had to be twice what the shipping containers are in actuality. That solution would obviously lead to problems down the road as the design phase of the project moves to interiors.

There may be a setting or approach to the wall recess function that I am missing, but as of yet my best course of action appears to be a return to my original solution of using an extrude. This will allow me to get accurate internal and external dimensions. While it is possible that, once insulation and paneling are added to the interiors Jonathan’s wall recess solution would be best, my plan is to treat the insulation and panels as separate 3D objects (or walls) and cut holes in them where windows and doors are.

While this route is slightly more laborious on a per object basis it will allow for more accurate modeling of the building. The structural elements of the containers, specifically the vertical corner pieces, make any wall tool solution a little more complicated than a standard drafting project.

The roof of these containers provides its own interesting drafting challenges which I intend to cover next week.

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Tis a poor craftsman who blames the right tool for the right job

Monday, September 20th, 2010

For a long time I was a strong proponent of the saying “Tis a poor craftsman who blames his tools.” The principal is a sound one at a certain level. Blaming a hammer because you did not hit a nail straight is disingenuous and foolish. It does not allow you to learn by paying attention to what you did wrong.

This idea becomes corrupted when translated into “I can make anything work under any circumstances.” While one could make a project work under poor conditions, they will not make the best work that could be made. It is possible to light a musical with three dozen lights on a two scene preset but it will never look good. One could make a passable effort and do something which looks good in spite of the limitations, but when we are concerned with truly great work we must have the right tools for the job.

This is a problem that lighting designers encounter regularly when working in the theater. Many venues have a stock of lights and many producers want to use that stock of lights rather than renting or buying equipment which fits the specific needs of the production. While one can do decent work sometimes without the right tool it is not the best work possible. A bank of PARcans is fundamentally different than a single 4k HMI. A Leko with frost is not the same thing as a Fresnel. SketchUp is not Vectorworks.

Too often a lighting designer is forced to use equipment that is simply not the right tool for the job. We learn to make the best possible work we can but that is fundamentally different than having the right tools to begin with. This happens with the physical lights themselves as well as control systems. While I have learned to program an ETC Expression so that it can do nearly everything an Obsession can do, having the Obsession makes the workflow much smoother and ultimately results in better work. And there are some things you just cannot do with an Expression.

Selecting the right tool for the job is what makes the great stand out from the good. Sometimes a bank of PARcans is the right choice over a 4k HMI. Sometimes an Expression is preferable to an Obsession. More complex technology is not always the right choice. Worklights from Home Depot make better footlights than nearly any theatrical lights available.

Knowing what technology to choose makes a great designer. If the solution does not work after having chosen the technology, the fault is not in the technology but in the designer’s choice. Always carefully selecting the tools we use does not preclude us from occasionally choosing the wrong ones. But then we learn and grow and do not make the same mistake twice.

This is an important idea for producers to understand. If we do not have the right tools we can not do our best work. This is a plain and simple truth. But it is incumbent upon the designer to choose wisely and appropriately. Being indulgent and buying into the idea that newer and more complex must be better diminishes the cause of getting the right tools when we need them.

I remember hearing Warren Flynn talk once about seven years ago. At the time I was very caught up in the newer is better mentality. His perspective made me question that. Someone made a derisive comment about some Autoyokes in his moving light rig and cheap producers. He was quick to point out that he specs them intentionally because they are quick to program and save tons of time when a simple frontlight special is needed. Shutters, gobos, rotation, frost control, and color all take valuable programming time when what the director wants is simple facelight or a downlight on a chair.

The designer needs to control the technology. If things go the other way around we have a disaster waiting to happen. Many draftsmen use nothing more than vellum and a number 2 pencil. It takes a lot of hand control to draft a high quality, readable set of construction drawings with a single middle weight pencil but if that is the right tool for the craftsmen then it is better than two boxes of top of the line drafting pencils or the most sophisticated 3D computer drafting program.

Learning new technologies is easy. Having complete control of the fundamental tools of one’s craft takes constant dedication and total attention. Focusing on our choices and learning from less than perfect ones allows us to grow and further perfect our craft.

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Design Software – Fall Preview

Monday, September 13th, 2010

As designers in the 21st century it is hard to imagine anything more fundamental to our work than the computer. The software we use to turn our ideas into designs is central to the work we do. Having played recently with Maya I have been thinking a lot about software and its role in design. While anyone with any degree of creativity is not bounded in that creativity by the tools they use, when you have the right tool for the job, the work becomes a lot easier and imagination is given freedom to roam unfettered.

There are some really exciting developments happening in the world of CAD this fall. The two of most interest to me are Vectorworks 2011 and AutoCAD for Mac. Vectorworks has long been a cross platform tool and the default drafting tool for theatrical lighting designers. AutoCAD has only ever played a minimal role with lighting designers and has been absent from the Mac since 1992.

Let’s start with Vectorworks. Information is a bit slim coming out of the company. What is known comes from a series of vague videos posted to their YouTube channel (Clip1, Clip2, Clip3). While the full range of of features remains unknown to the public, the direction they are moving in is very exciting.

The 3D environment looks to be vastly improved. The previously laborious 3D interface now appears to be a state of the art intuitive UI. Earlier versions of Vectorworks treated 3D space as an extension of 2D space. From their videos it appears that VW2011 3D space has been wholly redesigned as a native 3D environment. This is very good news.

Not only has the 3D working environment seen a massive upgrade, but the rendering engine is new as well. Renderworks is now based on Cinema 4D by Maxon Computers. This brings Vectorworks up to the cutting edge of 3D rendering technology. With the drafting precision we all love about Vectorworks and increasingly intuitive user interface combined with this massive upgrade to its rendering engine, Vectorworks is firmly taking a step towards being a competitive player in the 3D software world well beyond its conventional arenas of live entertainment, engineering, and architecture. I don’t know how popular the software is with game developers now, but I would imagine a substantial increase in that market with this release.

The next exciting development comes from Autodesk with their announcement of AutoCAD for Mac.

I have not used AutoCAD since it’s 2001 release when I was at San Francisco Opera. Having come from a Vectorworks background I found the logic behind the software a bit difficult to wrap my head around. Still firmly rooted in its early 1980′s command line mentality, AutoCAD 2001 was a very foreign language to me. The new software looks to be quite different. Being a new build of the program based on OSX from coverflow to a Mac style UI, the advances look to be very promising.

Not only does the visual layout of the UI look good (as a designer I want my working environment to reflect good aesthetic principals) but the 3D rendering engine looks beautiful.

I would honestly be surprised if AutoCAD made the developments necessary to really gain a foothold in the world of theatrical lighting. I will certainly keep my mind open to the possibility, but last I knew AutoCAD the difference between an AutoCAD block and a Vectorworks symbol were so far apart as to make them an ultimately useless comparison. Unless and until AutoCAD has an object type comparable in scope and functionality to the VW symbol it will never be a goto program for lighting designers.

All that said, it looks like a beautiful program for all other manner of draftsmen. In fact, I am waiting excitedly to get my hands on a copy of the software and see what they have done with it. AutoCAD for Mac looks to be very exciting indeed.

Providing a Mac platform for its software was not enough for Autodesk however. AutoCAD has also developed a line of mobile applications for devices like the iPad. This move will be wonderful for architects and other designers to share drawings and renderings with clients. Allowing the client an interactive experience rather than the static experience of a JPEG or PDF will be a boon to designers, engineers, and architects around the world.

It is an exciting time for software in the entertainment industry. Not only is the basic drafting technology improving at a rapid pace, but the 3D environments are becoming both common and easy to use. That ease of use will allow 3D to move from a nice to have to a need to have as both rendering and modeling time drops substantially.

All these new developments have me excited. What software are you looking forwards to?

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Lighting in Maya – Naturalism

Monday, September 6th, 2010

30 days is just enough time to get a basic familiarity with a computer program. Certainly when exploring it in one’s spare time between other projects. I began by working my way through the getting started guide to Maya 2011 and then moved on to my own projects. I knew I wanted to try my hand at some naturalistic lighting but did not have the modeling skills to get the level of detail and control that I would like with a project.

I contacted my friend Deb who used to work with Maya professionally and she offered to build and texture a scene for me. I drew a rough 2D layout in Vectorworks showing the groundplan of the scene I wanted. A street that Ts into another street, brick buildings, windows on the right hand side and a warehouse with steel rollup doors on the left. I wanted streetlights as I knew I would light the scene at night. Basically everything was there to show off different lighting ideas from streetlights to bare bulbs to fluorescent tubes to the headlights of a car.

Below is the opening frame of the animation.

A few seconds in a 1963 Jaguar rounds the corner and drives down the street. The light from the car scrapes against the various walls and textures creating a lovely effect.

It was an interesting experience to manage all the various ways in which light can exist in a 3D world. Obviously there are the rays of light emanating from a source. But it can be decided by the designer if those rays cast shadows or even if they stop when they hit an object. The headlights, streetlights, and lit windows all had an added feature of glow. Just because a light emanates from a source does not inherently mean that source glows, even though it would in the real world.

One of the most interesting aspects of this project for me was dealing with the rate of decay of a light. At one end of the spectrum a light can have no decay meaning its intensity continues unabated over space. Obviously we know from the inverse square law that this is not the case in reality. But in a 3D environment we need to trick the software in order to look real. The light from the sun, for all practical purposes, should have no decay in a digital environment. A fluorescent on the other hand should have a very rapid rate of decay. The sodium vapor of a streetlight, or an incandescent bulb, would land in between these two.

I often find myself, when working on a theatrical production, trying to fake naturalistic lighting conditions. Yet no matter how much it is faked I am still using real lights. As such they behave like real light should behave. In a digital environment like this, one has control over every aspect of physics. As such you can explore what parameters will make the illusion most accurate.

My license with Maya 2011 is up just in time for the new release of Vectorworks 2011 on September 14th. From what I have seen, VW2011 has added some amazing new features to its 3D environment. I look forward to exploring these new features with the 3D knowledge I gained in Maya.

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Lighting in Maya – Basic Animation

Monday, August 30th, 2010

I tried my hand at some basic animation in Maya last week. I was not planning on posting this, but after showing it to my nieces and nephew and getting such a favorable response I figured I would put it up this week. The kid test is critical for a cartoon. A 4 year old has a better bullshit detector than most adults.

I found the windmill shapes on the internet but everything else was drawn by me. I created all the textures and shaders. Of course the lighting was all my design.

This was my first time trying my hand at animation since I was 12 years old doing stop motion with legos. My intent with this was to create a scene that would allow for several variations in lighting looks. The pacing is off, which is not surprising as I am wholly new to this technology, but barring it being a bit slow and clunky I enjoy the basic story of a little windmill traversing many difficulties and ultimately growing up.

I hope you enjoy!



You will need Quicktime 7 or higher to view the video. If you are still having trouble feel free to download the movie and watch it at your leisure.

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Lighting in Maya – Skies and Clouds

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

I have been working with a trial version of Maya over the last few weeks teaching myself basic animation and 3D lighting techniques. In my first week I reconstructed an image from a show I lit several years ago. This past week I tried my hand at animating a little scene. Even simple animation is a wholly new skillset and takes a lot of concentration to make even moderate gains.

This past weekend I shifted to somewhat more familiar terrain, skies and clouds. While the 3D medium is new, I have been lighting sky drops for years. The basic set up included a white translucent rectangle for the sky and some clouds made of nParticles (Maya’s objects that recreate realistic clouds, smoke, and water). Once I got a cloud formation I liked, I stopped the animation at that frame and began lighting. What follows is the same exact cloud formation altered only by changes in the intensity, direction, and color of the light used. The big revelation for me was that because this is a 3D environment I did not need to leave the sky drop as a passive object but rather could have it glow as well as be lit from the front and through from behind. I must admit, I felt a little bit like Neo from The Matrix realizing that the laws of physics are provisional at best.

The above image was lit as close to a true recreation of natural light as possible. The sky had a light blue glow to it and a single light shone and refracted through the clouds to illuminate them. One thing I found particularly interesting was that by simply shifting the colors, angles, and intensity I could invert the image above into the one below. Thus the Cumulus clouds of the above image are transformed into Cirrus clouds below.

Some of my early attempts used a lot of lights since I began from my background in stage lighting. As I worked with the scene I kept taking away more and more lights and found that far from diminishing the image, the quality and dynamism would improve with fewer lights. Some ideas required the use of numerous lights. The image below has a set of lights for the lavender horizon to give it some slight color variation and several lights at the top to light the higher sky in green tones. The clouds too had a variety of lights pointed at them to give a nice range of color and tone.

More directional sunset effects like the one below obviously required multiple lights in order to get the desired effect. But I found multiple lights to be difficult to work with as they quite easily blew out and over exposed the clouds themselves.

The ease of moving and refocusing the lights in a virtual environment makes experimentation fun and easy. In a real world setting it can take a lot of time, effort, and manpower to move and refocus a single light. In virtual environments like this is takes a couple of seconds. Be the interest naturalistic effects like the above or moody more abstract looks like below, lighting in virtual environments gives the designer a wide latitude in terms of what is available to them.

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The Most Beautiful Angle of Light

Friday, August 20th, 2010

The first time I ever turned them on I fell in love. The way these lights eased across the dancer’s body and defined every aspect of their musculature was stunning. The full, yet severe, look they gave to these people was a quality I knew I could never get enough of.

Of course we see this quality of light regularly outside of a stage. A sunrise or sunset has, at the most magical moment, this quality of light pouring over our faces as we stare into the ever shifting sky. Our faces light up in myriad colors like the shifting sky itself.

I am talking here of the head high sidelight.

Not only is this angle of light utterly beautiful at an aesthetic level, it is one of the most practical and useful angles a lighting designer has in his tool box.

The beauty comes in large part from the fact that this angle of light shows off an object to its most sculptural. Unless we are dealing with a totally flat surface, like a plastic box, Head Highs are going to show off nearly any bump or fold the object has to offer. At the same time, it fills in the figure enough that you get the sense of a completely lit object. This becomes especially useful when dealing with a performer’s face.

This combination of lending sculptural dimensionality and fully illuminating faces is one of the great aspects of sidelight in general. Head High Sidelight is especially nice because it can do so with a dramatic intensity not possible with other lighting angles. High Sidelight tends to be a bit softer and lower angles, like Shins, tend to be a little too severe for most applications. Head Highs, however, have an almost universal appeal.

At a practical level they are invaluable. One can fully light a rather large volume of performance space with very few lights since a single Head High will cross the entire stage, whereas a High Sidelight will only cover partway across a stage. Because of this, an entire stage can be lit with as few as eight to twelve lighting instruments. Hopefully we are never limited in this way. However, many touring dance companies will encounter such limitations, often due to time constraints, and can effectively light an entire evening of dances with just a handful of lighting instruments.

Another practical benefit is the ease of access with which one can alter these lights. Color and template changes, as well as quick shutter adjustments, can be made rapidly between curtains for dances, scenes, or acts in an evening. Thus, our touring dance company could have a completely different palette one dance to the next despite the use of a single angle of light throughout the evening.

One can fast see why such a lighting angle would be popular with dance companies, traditionally known for their limited budgets and even more limited tech time. Yet an angle of such grace, beauty, and versatility need not be limited to dance. Theater and Opera both are ripe mediums for such illuminative explorations.

The beauty of the Head High should live free of the conventions of modern dance or naturalistic sunsets. It gives a sense of drama unlike any other lighting angle. With such beauty and grace at our disposal how could we possibly say no?

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