juicy blender TUTE102 -  Lighting the scene
 

 

Welcome to the 2nd instalment of the Tute1XX series.
 

Today we are going to use that hammer created in 101 as our
model for  staging, lighting, camera work and
surfaceing(texturing).
 

OkiDoki lets get started.
 

Load the hammer file from before
(you DID save it didn't you??)
 

Make sure it is scaled so it's not to large and can be seen
in the cameras viewport
NUMPAD0.
Diferent people like different scales to work in so
whatever your comfortable with..
(smaller is better though).
 

 

The first thing we need to do is move the camera into
a nice position.
 

Select the camera with the right mouse button. Then in
the camera viewport
NUMPAD0 hit the rotate
key
RKey and while holding down the middle mouse
button Move
GKey the mouse.
When the middle button is pressed, the rotation is freed up
from the Y Axis.
 

When you have a nice angle click the left  mouse
button
to accept.
 

Press the Grab key GKey and move the  camera
so the hammer is in a nice centered location in the
camera viewport.


Press RENDER F12. You will see a black box appear.
This is because there is no lamp light) in the scene.
A blender  scene must have a lamp to make the objects
visible.
 

Press ESC to get rid of the render box.
 

Move the 3D cursor above and to the right of the camera and
activate the top view
NUMPAD7. press SPACE ADD LAMP.

 

 

Press F12 again to render and this time your hammer should
be looking all nice and grey and smooth!
 

Move to the side view NUMPAD3 then press F4 to bring
up the lamp properties.
 

Click on the Button SPOT to turn the Lamp into a spotlight.
only spotlights can cast shadows and we want to cast a
shadow here)

 


 

Now move GKEY the spotlight over the  hammer
so the hammer is in the spotlights cone.
This cone is where light will hit objects. Any object out
of the cone will not recieve the spotlights  light.

 

Rotate RKEY the Spotlight in the side and top
views so the light is falling from an angle casting nice
diagnal  shoadow.

 

Press F12 again to render. You will notice  there are still
no shadows. This is because you have to tell blenders
renderer to render them even though shadows are
selected on the  lamp.
 

Press F10 to access the Renderbuttons and click
the shadows button.

 

Render again and your hammer should have shadows.

 

The problem you can see is that while we're getting light
from the spotlamp we still need more light for the areas
blackened by shadows.
 

To remedy this simply add another lamp SPACE ADD  LAMP.
 

The lamp will be placed wherever the 3d cursor is.

 

Press F4 to acces the lamp paramaters and  slide
the energy down so its not as bright as the spotlight.

Render that and you have a nice little fill light
releiving the dark parts of before.
 

 

So we can really see what that spotlamp is doing, we'll
quickly add a  plane to the scene for the hammer to cast
shadows onto.
Planes are commonly used for making a ground or floor
objects.
 

Move the 3d cursor so it is just below the hammers handle
and press
SPACE ADD MESH PLANE
The plane will appear  in edit mode. It will most likely
be to small so scale it with the
SKey and make
it roughly this size.

 

Then press TAB to exit edit mode and move  it into position.
 

Now render again and you will see the floor is under the
hammer and recieving nice shadows.

 

If you notice the floor, the shadow is quite crisp. It would
be nice to make it a bit softer around the edges.
To do this select the Spotlamp that is casting the shadows
and press
F4 to access its buttons.
 

Adjust the slidebutton that reads SPOTBL and
make it a bit higher.

 

Now render again F12 and you will see a  nice soft edge
on that shadow!

 

Ok, thats probably enough to send you crazy at the moment.
Have a play  around with lamps on some other scenes. See how
playing with Buffer sizes and  samples can improve shadow
quality but use more ram .
 

And last but not least save this scene for future tutes