Gundam Weapons

This picture was produced to test the possibility of creating a global-light setup without using radiosity or diffuse lighting shaders. The common idea behind all global lighting fakes is to simulate diffusion of light from the sky through a "dome" of multiple light sources. That's exactly what I started doing in Lightwave, when I found the excellent Eki Halkka Overcaster scene setup.

Overcaster is a set of pre-made scene you can import in a Lightwave project, featuring not only a complete sky dome, but also a method of light coloring: passing lights through an invisible, mapped, color filtering ball the light that arrives to the model inherits the color of the global map used as a texture for the invisible ball, faking radiosity from the surrounding ambient. Overcaster also features a "light-tilting" technique to blur and smooth the shadows generated through raytracing.

This picture has no light sources but overcaster's, and a greeny global map applied to the invisible Overcaster ball.