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| 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