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The simple way to do natural light in Modo 302

When it comes to lighting, texturing, shading, and all that stuff, Modo really is fun and easy to work with. One of the new features in Modo 302 is a simple Physical Sun and Sky setup that gives great results without requiring a lot of tweaks or time. Of course, if you want to tweak, you’ve got all the controls available, but the defaults are pretty good right out of the box.

The idea behind Physical Sun is simple – how would something light up at a certain time of the day at a certain place on the earth, and what would the sky look like as well? To use it, all we need to do is tell Modo where you are and what time of day, and you’ll see the results in the render preview right away. Let’s take a look at a really simple scene that I’m sure looks like something you’d have in your house: a glass bottle on a marble pedestal. We’ll start by taking a look at the scene using the default lighting (a single directional light) and the default environment (a 4 color gradient). Here’s what our bottle looks like with just the defaults (click on the thumbnails):

OK. I admit – not the greatest job modeling, texturing, or posing. But it will work for our purposes. Now, let’s go into the Environment settings and change from the default 4 color gradient to a Physical Sun setup. You’ll find it in the Shader tree:

We’ll change that to:

You’ll notice at the bottom of the panel the settings for “Sun Light”, which in this case is using the Directional Light. If you remember, this is the default light in the scene so you won’t have to create any new lights to make this work. The last time I checked, the Sun is a pretty directional light as far as we on Earth are concerned. What we’ll need to do now is tell our Directional Light aka the “Sun” where we are on earth and what time of day it is. To do that, we’ll select the Directional Light under the Shader Tree and make the appropriate selections. Here’s what that looks like:

Click on the button for “Physical Sun”:

Tell it what time and day it is, and where you are:

You can even setup your own special locations by entering the latitude and longitude, then saving it with a location name:

Some Sample Renderings

You’ll quickly notice how much better the image looks, and how much nicer the objects are lit. You’ll want to use Thermonuclear lighting more just because of how easy this is to do, but keep in mind that like HDR images it’s not a cure-all. Just because you use Physical Sun doesn’t mean you can’t use additional lighting or HDR. Here’s a sample with Physical Sun turned on, with indirect lighting enabled:

Here’s one with Physical Sun and a simple HDR image used as an Environmental image:

Experiment and Play – you won’t hurt anything!

Try lighting up some models with Physical Sun and perhaps a few HDR images that ship along with Modo. You’d be surprised at how easy it is and how good it looks. You’ll also notice that you can command the universe to do completely unnatural things, e.g. offset the Earth’s rotation to fit your whimsy, but thats a topic for another entry. But like I said, give it a shot and see how you like it.

Daylight Example Video – 24 hours in 10 seconds