Ron's Tip - Cube

Ron Davis' Painting Tip - A Cube

Modeling and rendering a cube.
Since 1964 when I began including pictorial space into my paintings I have done thousands of cubes, slabs, blocks, etc. Modeling and rendering a cube is a simple task, even simple minded, but as an artist that is what I do, and have done over and over in my pre-computer perspective drafting and in VIDI since 1988. Drawing a 3D cube using the computer is a lot easier than drawing it the old fashioned way. One of the simplest things to do using Presenter 3D is draw a white cube [using a Primitive] and render it. This view uses a forty-five degree wide-angle lens.

"Rotating" the cube.
Here the cube is placed on a grey rug on a blue floor, balanced on its edge, and lit with two suns, thereby creating cast shadows.
Painted Cube

"Painting" the cube red.
Here the cube's color is changed from white to red.

"Painting" the cube with light.
But if one wants not a shaded white or red cube, but rather wants to "Paint" a cube with a orange top and bottom, green front and back, and red sides, ones modeling stratagies must change a bit. The white cube was lit by changing two white light source suns to green and red lights, thereby painting the cube with colored light. Of course the hidden sides of the cube are still white (or shadowed grey), but we don't know that, and assume that they are colored. The cast shadow of the green light is red, because in the shadow there has an absence of green light, and the shadow of the red light is green.
Painted Cube

"Morphing" the lights and the cube's color.
In this simple minded endless animation the white cube changes to a red cube then back to a white cube and the the red and green suns turn to white suns and back to red and green while the cube does one rotation. At the same time the black floor under the grey rug turns tourquoise and back to black.