Okay, I think I'm getting somewhere now.

Really didn't realize how hard the lighting was going to be on this shot!

In the end, I gave up on "realistic" light coming in the window, and just put the spotlight INSIDE the porthole. Less physically accurate, but it works better -- no weird shadow-layer stuff.

Also, realized that since I added "Emit" to all the toon materials to give them a basic dark color, I need to tone that down in the composite a bit to get the light contrast I was after.

#Blender3D #BlenderInternal #Lighting #NPR3D

I've never really understood why the "Shadow" pass produces the colors that it does. It seems to contrast with the scene colors (the orange spacesuit has a purple "shadow" here).

The shadow here is presumably cast by the shell of the spacecraft.

I set things up so that the "Shadow" pass from Blender Internal is rendered as a separate layer.

But that means I need to re-composite it. With trial and error, I settled on using the mix node with "Darken" mode. Which mostly works, but sometimes produces very odd-looking results.

So I wonder if this isn't really the right way to recombine the shadow layer.

And of course, Blender Internal rendering engine lore is getting harder to find.

Does anyone remember how to do this correctly?
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The light source is now an "area light", but the effects are basically the same if I use "spot light". The original version of this used a spot light as the source -- I don't think area lights existed in that version of Blender, yet.

Weird stuff. #Blender3D #BlenderInternal #Compositing