SHAWN HARGREAVES ON THREE-POINT LIGHTING

For those of us who sometime happened the get or still get in touch with 3D animation (or photography, or cinematography, ...), hearing "Three-Point Lighting" technique should ring a bell.

It does, doesn't it? But, have you ever wonder why you had to use this visual technique? If you don't know the answer yet and still wonder why, just browse to Shawn's blog to find out.

From Shawn's post: "... Pretty much every movie ever made and every fashion shot ever photographed have depended on this lighting rig. There are many variations:

• To increase the perception of shape without needing too much contrast between light and shadow, tint the key light yellow and the others blue.
• For a moody drama, make the key light much brighter than the fill.
• For a cheerful sit-com, make all three lights equally bright.
• For a scary effect, position the key light low to the ground.
• For a mysterious or fantastic effect, make the back light unusually bright so the character seems to glow around the edges.

But the underlying principle is always the same. Things simply look better when lit this way ...".

Read on!

"TORQUE CONSTRUCTOR" NOW AVAILABLE

Again, news not related to XNA (at least, for now).

GarageGames has released the long awaited "Constructor" for the Torque Game Engine (TGE) and Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA), for free.

To read the full list of features go here, and to download it, here.

[Now that TorqueX is out, maybe integration of this level editor to XNA is on the roadmap ...]

A RAY TRACER IN C# 3.0

Recently, some members in the XNA Creators' forums have been asking for an example on ray-tracing. Well, Check LukeH's blog, then.

This guy has posted an interesting project based on the third version of the .NET Framework, which implements a ray tracer by using some of the new features of this framework, like LINQ and lambdas.

From LukeH's post: "... Although we often demo C#3.0 using databases and XML to show off LINQ - it turns out that the new language features really are also great for applications which have little to do with querying. Ray tracing, for example, is certainly not one of the prototypical scenario for query and transformation of data. Nonetheless, I found quite a few places in the code where C#3.0 and LINQ to Objects really improved the code - making it easier to express what the program was doing ...".

Not related to XNA, I admit, but nice screenshot, uh?!

[Again, imagine XNA, XAML, DX10 and .NET Framewor 3.5 ...]