Book Image

Blender 2.5 Lighting and Rendering

By : Aaron W. Powell
Book Image

Blender 2.5 Lighting and Rendering

By: Aaron W. Powell

Overview of this book

<p>Blender 3D is a popular, open source modeling and animation package. It is used for game design, architectural visualization, character design, animation, and still images. However, creating believable lighting and texturing is difficult in any 3D program.<br /><br />This step-by-step tutorial aims to familiarize you with Blender's new interface and basic features as well as take a look at what it takes to produce a believable scene using lighting, texturing, compositing, and rendering.<br /><br />By using the example of a tricycle in an outdoor scene you will learn to establish an effective workflow to increase your productivity. You will also thoroughly studying the scene and deciding how your tricycle would look on a sunny, cloudless day using Blender lamps. Not just that, you will also learn to implement your decisions by applying a 3-point light rig, adjusting the color of the lights, adding shadows, and using light groups to control the lighting. You will learn to add ambient occlusion effects to your scene by using both ray-traced and approximated ambient occlusion algorithms. A mesh example shows you how to give a particular look or "feel" by adding and editing materials. You will light a wine bottle on a table by taking a look at lighting interior spaces and how to create complex light rigs and custom UV textures for your scenes using Blender's UV editing capabilities. You will create a custom UV map, export it as a file type Blender can read, and finally add your UV map to the wine bottle mesh. In the same example you will add wood material to booths. You will further enhance the background by adding wallpaper, giving color and metallic tint to the lamps, and adding material to light bulbs. You will look at lighting techniques used in scenes that include both interior and exterior light sources in a scene that has sunlight traveling in through the window and a light bulb hanging from the ceiling.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Blender 2.5 Lighting and Rendering
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Indirect Lighting


Like Environment Lighting, Indirect Lighting was added with the release of Blender v2.5. This algorithm works in a similar fashion to the Environment Lighting algorithm, except that instead of taking light directly from the environment, Blender bounces light off of objects in our scene and uses the reflected light to illuminate our objects.

The following image shows the default Indirect Lighting settings:

This is most useful when using a mesh to illuminate a scene, instead of a lamp. Unfortunately, this algorithm also still has some issues—for example, it only renders a mesh as a lamp if we use the approximate algorithm and not the raytraced algorithm.

The following image shows a Mesh light rendered with the Approximate Indirect Lighting algorithm:

Applying ambient lighting to our working scene

Now that we know which algorithm to use, let's open up our original scene, outdoor.blend, and turn on ambient lighting there.

Tip

If you have renamed your scene since the beginning of Chapter...