When you apply a light to a scene in After Effects, all objects in the scene will be evenly lit. Even if one object is closer to the light source than another, there won't be a difference. Digieffects' Falloff Lighting fixes this. It's a plug-in that allows you to set up natural looking light effects.There’s not much to the Falloff Lighting plug-in, to be honest. You drag it to an object in the scene and you control the effect with no more than two parameters which you can set dragging a slider or entering a number.
The most important slider in Falloff Lighting obviously is “Distance Scale”. This slider controls the distance between the light and the object. In order to set the distance accurately, you can choose to show the distance values of the corners of the object you apply the effect to. For example, on a flat object (all layers should be converted to 3D) that has four corners, setting the Distance Scale to the number displayed in the corner the farthest from the light source will have the light spread all the way to that corner. If the light source then happens to be a spot light there will be a splash of harsh light on the object closest to the light source, which will very gradually fade out to a weak light effect in that corner.
The method to make the light fade out can be set by the second parameter. There’s a natural setting that follows nature’s physical laws, there’s a proportional setting and there’s a straight setting that seems to do little more than repeat what After Effects does by itself. Bottom line: if you want natural looking light effects, go for nature’s physical law setting.
Except for these two settings, Falloff Lighting also offers a Master layer that will “bundle” the effect for multiple layers beneath it. This can be useful when you apply a parallel light source to a number of objects that are all more or less on the same plane, and therefore up to even lighting.
Natural lighting effects possibleWhen you first use Falloff Lighting you’ll be in for a surprise—at least, I was. The plug-in’s default distance scale is a fairly low setting and that took me by surprise: my object—a short sentence in large white Helvetica—disappeared from view entirely. Dragging the slider to the right made it re-appear; as I was dragging slowly, it did so slowly and very unevenly. The effect was exactly what I was looking for: the spot light was targeted at the centre of the sentence and the centre got the most light.
I then added a second short paragraph and pushed it backward along the Z axis. With Distance Scale for this object set equal to the far right corner value of the paragraph, the resulting effect on both sentences was actually quite stunning and surprisingly dynamic.
The whole process took me no more than 3 minutes. Falloff Lighting used to be part of Buena Vista Depth Cue, but you can now buy it as a separate product—my advice would be that you try it out for yourself—I’m sure you’ll love it!
