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

Establishing a workflow


The key to constantly producing high-quality work is to establish a well-tested and efficient workflow. Everybody's workflow is different, but over the course of the next few chapters, we are going to follow this series of steps:

  1. Evaluate what the scene we are lighting will require.

  2. Plan how we want to lay out the lamps in our scene.

  3. Set lamp positions, intensities, colors, and shadows, if applicable.

  4. Add materials and textures.

  5. Tweak until we're satisfied.

Evaluating our scene

Before we even begin to approach a computer, we need to think about our scene from a conceptual perspective. This is important, because knowing everything about our scene and the story that's taking place will help us produce a more realistic result.

To help kick start this process, we can ask ourselves a series of questions that will get us thinking about what's happening in our scene. These questions can pertain to an entire array of possibilities and conditions, including:

  • Weather

    • What is the weather...