This tutorial is about the spinning light trick: a cunning way of 'faking' the effects of global illumination (GI) when lighting scenes. A few years ago, anyone using LightWave 3D 5 or higher would have learned this technique as a matter of course. However, in a recent conversation with a new user, we realised that they'd never heard of it, and were relying on area lights and radiosity instead. As a result, they were enduring insanely long render times.
The trick exploits the way LightWave antialiases and applies motion blur to a scene. Essentially, in order to antialias, LightWave just renders the scene several times with slight sub-pixel offsets to the positions of the rendered pixels. It then combines the results to give you the final render. You can choose the number of passes from the Camera Properties panel: while older versions of LightWave just had Low, Medium, High and Extreme Antialiasing (5, 9, 17 and 33 antialiasing passes respectively) the new PLD antialiasing modes let you choose the number of passes more explicitly and apply antialiasing to each pass before the software adds them together. LightWave uses the same passes for both the antialiasing and the motion blur, so if you're antialiasing you might as well use both, since it's going to have to render the passes anyway. Furthermore, because of the simple method LightWave uses to evaluate motion blur (it basically moves the scene a little bit between frames and then renders what it sees) you can motion blur anything, even the positions of lights, in ways that mean you can render a very different light position in each antialiasing pass.
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