Lighting - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 211

13
lighting

Lighting is perhaps the aspect of an image that most
impacts how we perceive it. Lighting can change the
tone of an image and make characters and scenery
look either dark and sinister or warm and inviting.
In this chapter, I'll work on lighting the projects I've
built so far using a variety of techniques, including
both Blender Internal's array of lighting options and
Cycles' more physically accurate methods for creat-
ing different kinds of lights.

renderer, neither Cycles nor Blender Internal is
the right choice for everything, and both have
advantages. For example, Blender Internal's lights
are quick to render and offer a wide variety of uses
and styles, while Cycles offers a reliable and realis-
tic way of working with lights that doesn't require
much tweaking to produce good results. We'll use
both renderers in this chapter as we light the Bat
Creature for rendering in Blender Internal and
the Spider Bot and Jungle Temple for rendering in
Cycles.

Blender Internal vs. Cycles Lighting
Both Blender Internal and Cycles have a wide variety
of powerful tools for lighting. Blender Internal sup-
ports a range of lights that behave in different ways,
as well as two methods for rendering shadows—
using either shadow buffers or ray tracing—both
of which will be discussed shortly.
Cycles uses only ray tracing for lighting, and
its results are more realistic than those of Blender
Internal. It also supports the emission of light
from meshes, allowing you to create lights of any
shape. But while Cycles is the more realistic lighting

Lighting in Blender Internal
Blender Internal uses Blender's lamp objects to
light a scene. To create a lamp, press shift -A in
Object mode and choose one of the following
under Lamp:

Area This creates a square- or rectangular-shaped
lamp that emits light from all over its area. Area
lamps support ray-traced shadows and are well
suited for creating soft shadows and studio-
style lighting, but they can slow render time