Rather than focus on creating “a light”, I focused on the shadows. I remembered some blue triangular tarps at a car dealership in town. Once I created a box, deleting the bottom and sides, modified it into a triangle, and shaped it accordingly, I constructed a structure. I started by building then with a central point of contact, then taking one and modifying it. In Maya a lattice deforms, but in 3d max it connects points along the edges to give a wireframe model look while retaining the surface. Then I took the original and split it up as if the tarp were made up of 4 tarps with gaps in between. This is all to give great shadows, but when I played with the lights, I was able to find volumetric lights. I liked the effect it gave, and after playing with it I got great shadows that can be both soft, helped by the inverse square falloff, and sharp. The scene was very dark nonetheless, so I added a duplicate light inside the structure to make it look like the source of the volumetric light was also casting light. The third light came from the outside of the sphere making the background so that the outside of the structure could be lit or partially lit based on the angle of the camera.
For materials I made 3 distinct textures for the structure. One with a fractal opacity map, and another fractal specularity map. The third brings some consistency to an otherwise exotic material. The last thing I did was make the light, ironically. I made a sphere and added a map on the self illumination, and sometimes the light looks like the moon, or a simplified version of it.
Kind of a lot to write, but it was a big project with a lot of allotted time...
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