Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
is almost done. Second, materials will
appear differently under different lighting
conditions. Few things in 3D are worse
than spending hours surfacing your
models under a studio-style lighting
setup, only to learn that everything looks
wrong under the final light structure of
your scene.
Do your lighting first, and make it good.
The Tools:
Directional Lighting
You get out of bed in the middle of the
night. It's dark. You can't see. You turn on a lamp. That's about as simple as it gets in real life, but it's
not quite so easy in 3D. Light isn't real there. It doesn't have physical properties. In the end, it's just the
processor figuring out which triangles are where, whether they can see any lights from their point of view,
and how they are oriented. Different aspects of lighting that we take for granted, such as shadows or the
way that a large light source makes things look differently than a small one, can cost the computer lots of
time and cycles to calculate. In order to keep those calculations to a minimum, 3D applications give you
a choice of a number of different kinds of lights. Each are optimized for certain tasks. Let's take a look.
Figure 5.1
The limits of working in 3D.
Point Lamp
The point lamp is the simplest kind of light source available in Blender. You can see both the lamp's 3D
representation and its control panel from the Properties window in
Figure 5.2
.
Lamps are added to your scene just like any other object:
Shift-A
. They appear at the 3D cursor, as you
would expect. There are a number of organizational and workflow controls on the panel. The top row
of buttons allow you to switch an object from one lamp type to another, should you change your mind
after adding the lamp to the scene. The checkboxes labeled “Negative,” “This Layer Only,” “Specular,”
and “Diffuse” will all be discussed later. For now, the three most important controls are
Color, Energy,
and
Distance
. These are common to all of the lamp types.
Color
LMB clicking on the color swatch brings up Blender's color picker. It is similar to color pickers from just
about every application you've ever used, from Word to Photoshop. Set your Color values by LMB drag-
ging inside the color wheel and adjusting the vertical value slider, or by setting the RGB values below it.
The default color for all lamps is white, represented in RGB as (1,1,1). Almost no light you will ever
encounter in real life is purely white. Don't let it happen in your scene. Take a hard look at the color of
the light source's real-life equivalent (unless it's the sun!) and the apparent color of the light that it casts.
Set your 3D light accordingly.
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