So, here is the first full lighting test for the new water base. To start, I changed the water base itself to an ellipse, and basically built a giant bathtub for the ship model:
The water is placed inside a dirt tub. Not kidding, that texture really is called "dirt." Anyway, I then turned on ray tracing and started playing around with different settings. I haven't manually adjusted any, yet, mainly because I want to find a preset lighting condition that is close to what I want, and then tweak it from there. Those tweaks will be my second full lighting test, and after that, I start showing off my various model ships under that one condition before I move on to different lighting conditions: sunrise, sunset, cloudy, night-time, aurora, etc.
First, the default:
Switching to "warm light" made a slight improvement:
However, the water looks too grey, so I put a blue colour over-ride on the dirt floor:
Too blue, so I tried cyan:
Better, but still not quite dark enough, so I switched to a preset lighting condition called "tranquility blue," which isn't actually a blue background:
Hmm... looks promising. I wonder what happens if I switch the base back to blue:
Bloody hell, it looks like the ship is floating in a pool of ink! Right, I'll turn colour over-ride on the floor OFF:
Well, that might be my best bet for now. There is no blue, and hardly any green to speak of, other than the ship's waterline, but I think this is what I'll build from.
Hang on... what would it look like if I turned the cyan floor back on, and put it under "dark sky?"
BEHOLD! I've found my night lighting conditions! Now I just need to work on the others...