Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
doing so correctly will go a long way toward believability. We'll talk about this little love triangle after
we finish with the tools rundown.
Distance
This is a value in Blender units that indicates the Falloff Distance of the light. At the value of the Distance
control, the energy from the lamp will be exactly half of its normal energy setting. An object that is 10.0
units away from a lamp of which the Energy value is 4.0 and the Distance value is 10.0, would actually
receive light energy of 2.0. Increasing or decreasing this value will drastically affect the way that your lamp
behaves and the look of your scene.
Note the illustrated arrows in
Figure 5.2
, all pointing away from the lamp in the 3D view. Point lamps
shine their light in all directions, emanating from the center of the object itself.
The next panel down in
Figure 5.2
is titled
Shadow
. Unlike the real world, shadows are an option in
3D. There are two main ways to compute shadows, techniques called
ray tracing
and
buffering
. Ray
tracing generally takes longer, and produces perfectly sharp shadows that are unlike almost anything in
nature. Buffering, though usually faster,
has a number of technical drawbacks that
make it only appropriate for one type of
lamp: the spot. We'll save the buffering
options until we work with spots.
In order to turn on ray-traced shadows for
a point lamp, you just LMB click the
Ray
Shadow
button. There aren't that many
options that we'll use at this stage. The
only one you might need to know is to
control
shadow color
. LMB clicking the
shadow color swatch allows you to change
the base color of the shadows cast by your
lamp.
Figure 5.4
shows the same scene,
one with normal black shadows (RGB,
0,0,0) and one with the shadows made less
“intense” with a bluish gray (RGB, 0.3,
0.3, 1). That's a pretty neat feature, don't
you think? Who would have come up
with such a cool thing? Why, that was
me, thank you very much.
Unless you have a specific reason to do
so, you probably will not be using ray-
traced shadows on a point lamp.
Figure 5.4
Changing the apparent “density” of a shadow with shadow color.
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