wjs7744 wrote:Thanks for the suggestions. I've never used ambient occlusion, I guess I should look it up and try it out. Area lights are a bit of a problem, they often come out looking, oh I don't know, would "grainy" be the right word? I read something somewhere about 7-point rigs, I guess that's something I could check out. And as for lighting being a pain, I'll second that. It doesn't really help that I haven't seen any good tutorials, so I'm kind of making it up as I go along. Hell, I don't even know what a fill light is, I just stuck three lights in the scene and hoped for the best.
fractalsponge's suggestion for GI works. It'll just be slower if you're using Lightwave's internal renderer (there are tricks to help you with that, though, and the FPrime plugin is very nice / fast although quite costly). Ambient occlusion and using light arrays helps you fake some of the GI effect by providing less flat shadows. Read up on Ambient occlusion, it's pretty neat.
As for Area lights, you have to either use more anti-aliasing passes or up the Area light quality. The area lights are grainy because they "sample" the lighting. Each additional pass of AA will get you more samples, so upping the AA will make it look better. Increasing Area light quality increases the number of samples, assuming the AA passes are constant, so it'll also reduce graininess. It'll be slower though.
There are key lights (the main light in the scene providing the most illumination) and fill lights (the other ones that light the scene up). So pick one to be the dominant light source and use the others as fill lights.
wjs7744 wrote:
The turbolaser is a bit of a problem, though, as lightwave doesn't allow volume lighting for linear or area lights for some reason. This means I have been using particles for them, which don't really work. Maybe if I use a linear light for illumination, and a really narrow spot for the bolt itself, that might work... And yeah, they look really wimpy for the heavy guns, but since I think the heavy turbolaser bolts might be bigger than the ship itself, I'm sticking with the little effect for now. Rendering out an entire frame that has been saturated by the blast would really be cheating.
Look for Dave Jerrard's laser tutorials. You can adapt it to make turbolasers bolts. It's written for LightWave 5.6 but you just have to map features to whatever version you're using.
. If you can open the ISD mesh on your machine it can handle GI renders. Not putting in the time to render out a proper image is like making an AMRAAM with Jello as the warhead - sure it's cheaper to make, but what the hell is the point? Your key light (the primary light source and shadow-casting light of the scene) should also have raytraced shadows. 
