Another collage-painting of my current “theoretical” architectural project, built on a scaffold of extracted viewport displays (with custom viewport display modes applied) and Rhino renders layered together in Photoshop. The second image is a cropped detail of the first. This time, I wanted a representational and emotive nighttime rendering, but not necessarily an accurate one in a lighting-solution sense. And that’s a good thing, because I don’t do a lot of illustrations showing “artificial light” (any kind of light other than Rhino’s built-in sun and/or skylight) and I had forgotten how undependable these “light objects” are in Rhino. I had hoped to use Rhino lights to generate (at the very least) suggestions of how the proposed light sources would cast shadows, but in the end I painted a great many shadow and lighting features into my illustration entirely using Photoshop.
You know, someone should do something about how inconsistently the light objects behave in Rhino: between two different Rhino renderings I could get entirely different lighting results even if I hadn’t adjusted any light object, and the representation of lights in viewports with shadows activated was often useless…lights maintained odd block-like attribute linkages, despite being copies and not blocks, and introducing a colored light in one area could cause random shifts in the color of supposedly non-colored light objects elsewhere as well as a completely different color shift for the same light object in a Rhino rendering. Sometimes lights or groups of light objects would disappear from the Lights Panel and the Properties Panel, even though they were visible in a viewport and actually seemed to be affecting the model lighting, and I could only get them to reappear for editing by quitting Rhino and restarting it. I know that I could have exported (tediously) my whole model to a different software package with a more reliable lighting system (Blender), but that always cramps my ability to make the inevitable minor design changes as I am assembling a set of project illustrations. I might as well have modeled and rendered entirely in Blender (which I find painful as a design and modeling tool), if I have to take my Rhino models to Blender to get some sort of realistic lighting solution. But as I noted above, since realism isn’t a current requirement I could just go with the flow of Rhino lighting limitations and fix it all artistically in Photoshop.