Lighting: The Easiest Thing That’s Tough - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 98

Chapter 5
Lighting: The Easiest Thing That's Tough
Blender's lighting tools are simple and fall into two categories: directional lighting, which is created by
lamp objects, and nondirectional lighting, which is generated with a technique called ambient occlusion.
It's “simple” in that the tools have only a few settings, and all work in the same basic way. In other words,
it is not difficult to use them.
The downside of it is that effective, quality lighting is difficult. It's hard enough to properly and nicely
light a scene in real life where the universe itself takes care of a bunch of the things we take for granted:
atmospheric scattering, diffuse reflection, filtering, etc. In the land of numbers, triangles, and tricks that is
3D, it becomes even more difficult. Figure 5.1 shows what happens when we place a simple light source
outside of a window in a room scene. Notice how it doesn't look anything remotely like what would
happen in the real world. No air or dust scatters the light as it enters the window. The light that hits the
far wall is not bounced and rebounced around the room, leaving anything not directly in its path com-
pletely black. Objects that are directly in its path cast no shadows. We have to take on all of these kinds
of things on our own.
Before we get into learning to play with Blender's lighting tools, let's take a moment to understand the
importance of lighting in a scene. It's simple, really. The wrong lighting will ruin a shot, regardless of how
fantastic your modeling and surfacing. The right lighting won't turn bad modeling and surfacing into
something that goes into a museum, but it might get you halfway there. Lighting sets the mood. It gives
us more environmental clues that can make or break the illusion of believability than any other aspect of
a scene. It quite literally determines what parts of your work are seen, and what parts are not.
You might be wondering why we are lighting a scene with only bare objects. We've not done any sur-
facing—materials and texturing—and have not really finished modeling yet. There are two reasons for this.
First, if you can light a scene effectively without any custom surfacing, you know you have done it right.
If you can convey the mood and setting of the scene properly through the lighting alone, then your job