Anybody knows how to create negative lights in Carrara 4? Plugins are OK if it is not definitely not available in the base software.

There aren't any negative lights, the SDK clamps the light output at 0 (or at least it did last time I tried it), but you might be able to do something like a mixer with Shoestring Graphic's Proximity shader to darken an area.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins

I don't know if this is the effect that you have in mind but the Shoestring Shaders do open up some very cool possibilities.

Thanks, I will check the Shoestring Shaders out. I'm new to Carrara, until now I just played with the Carvers Guild plug-ins. Basically that's for those plug-ins I wanted to do this project in Carrara, otherwise I could have that negative light in Poser, Vue or C4D. In fact I wanted to project a black light ray into the scene, darkening everything where it falls just like a real light ray would lighten them. Of course I can trick it a hundred different ways, probably including a invisible "ray object" and a proximity shader or just render with a real light ray and substract the result from the normal render in Photoshop ... I just wanted to do it in the clean way :)

Can someone explain? NEGATIVE LIGHT!!!!!!!!???????

bwtr

Hi bwtr, Think of it as anti-light: the stronger it is, the less light there is. The animation above has the sphere "sucking in" light instead of giving it off like a light bulb would. "So, how would I use negative light?", you might ask yourself. Your imagination is the limit. However, it's usually used in environmental scenes or large indoor scenes to speed up creation of moods. For example, if you had a room with a table lamp in it that was very bright but discovered that it was lighting up the room to much, instead of fussing with fall-off rates and ambient light settings, you could simply throw in a couple of negative lights in the corner of the room to remove the unwanted light. Negative lights could also be used on a hooded character to hide the it's face - even if there was a bright light in front of it. Hope this helps! It's kind a goofy thing to start thinking about but has some very valuable applications.

Thanks Mark-------I think!

bwtr

An old and ugly image....but I used negative lights on this one to enhance some of the shadows. http://home.earthlink.net/~nomuse/brycepages/ninja.html

Negative light also can be used for minerals that absorbs color(s) and cause different reflect colors. GI would need that. It is like HDRI effect but it can work without the map. With this negative light and GI would create more realistic environment light.