CGHeute has an interview with Till Nowak, discussing his newest work “Salad” which shows an interesting arrangement of fruit, as shown.
I used 4 Main. Lights and two arrays of 14 Point-Lights. I often use point-light configurations in order to generate soft shadows. The more lights the more you use, the soft shadows, I usually use 7-10 Lichter. In Maya, I would recommend to use Spot Lights, 3DS Max but there is hardly any difference in rendering times between Spot and Point Lights. This kind of lighting a scene for me is the most intuitive and compared with global illumination or “real” Area Shadows, rendering times are very low. The complete image “Salad” has only 10 Minutes to render necessary and at a resolution of 4000 ×4000 Pixels. For this illumination technique, it is important to the Shadows and decay Area are selected for each light.
