Spinning-Light-Ball

Some time ago, a clever alternative was developed to mimic the look of a full-on Radiosity rendering by attaching an array of Ray-Traced Shadow casting, Distant Lights to a Null, and set that Null spinning many-degrees-per-frame, letting high-iteration, multi-pass AntiAliasing (ie: LightWave's Enhanced High setting,) take care of blending the sub-frame position difference of the Lights into smoothly-lit, softly shadowed shading.

There are two problems with the Spinning-Light-Ball trick:

1) Sometimes, shadow edges can be seen in the softness of the shadows if there aren't enough lights in the scene.

2) There can be a noticeable flickering on some surfaces at certain angles if the parent Null's spin settings aren't quite right.

To solve the first problem, well, disperse more lights around your Null, though bear in mind that each Light will add to render-times.

To solve the second problem, you've got to understand that the Spinning-Light-Trick works best when it is used to create something like a halftone pattern to soften the edges of the Lights' shadows and reach the lights into nooks and crannies, a pattern that is exactly the same on every single frame, (otherwise, the differences between frames will be perceived as flickering).

So, I've found that the best results aren't from a huge, 360° spin over every frame, but rather a small, (5° or less,) oscillation on all axes.

The best way I've found to control the spin of the Null that controls a Spinning-Light-Ball is through LightWave's Simple Harmonic Oscillator, Channel Modifier accessible through the Graph Editor, applied to H, P and B axes.

In order to get the same "Halftone-Pattern" of shadows to be dispersed by the lights, every single frame, the value for the Cycle Time must be in relationship to the Frames-Per-Second in which you are working. To have the Lights make one, complete oscillation per frame at 24fps, you would enter, 1/24, (it's a great thing about LW's numeric inputs in that you can type-in mathematical expressions, and LW calculates the answer for you as your input).

The best dispersal/Halftone pattern I've found is with the Parent Null oscillating 3x/frame on H, 1x/frame on P, and 2x/frame on B. (The values here are for working at 24fps.)