Lighting - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 212

significantly because they require more samples
than other lamp types to produce noise-free
results.

Hemi This lamp lights the entire scene in a dif-
fuse way, similar to outdoor light from the sky.
Because it doesn't support shadows, it's very
quick to render but of limited use.

Point This creates a point light, which emits light
in all directions from the lamp's center. It sup-
ports ray-traced shadows and is a good general
purpose lamp.

Color picker

Spot Spot lamps are like a spotlight at a theater
or a flashlight. They emit light in a cone from
their origin, making them a good tool for light-
ing specific areas. They support both ray-traced
shadows and shadow buffers. Shadow buffers
produce shadows without ray tracing and are
generally significantly faster to render. This
makes them very versatile and useful for scenes
that need a high degree of control over lighting.

Sun This lamp lights an entire scene from one
direction, just as the sun might. It supports ray-
traced shadows.

The settings for each lamp can be altered
from the Object Data tab of the Properties editor,
which has a lamp icon when a lamp is selected as
the active object. You can adjust a lamp's bright-
ness and falloff —the distance over which the
strength of its light fades—as well as the settings
for shadows, colors, and so forth. While different
lamps—particularly spot lamps—have certain unique
features, they generally share the same settings. The
settings for a point lamp are shown in Figure 13-1
and discussed below.

Figure 13-1: The settings for a point lamp

of the light to fade to zero over the determined
distance rather than tapering off indefinitely.

Negative This turns the light into an “anti” lamp
that removes light from the scene instead of
adding it. This setting can be useful for creat-
ing dark corners or hiding areas of a scene in
shadow.

Light Color This color picker lets you choose the
color of your light.

Energy This determines the overall intensity of
your light.

This Layer Only This causes lights to illuminate
only objects on their same layer. This setting can
be useful for lighting individual objects.

Falloff Available only for point and spot lamps,
this controls the distance and curve over which
the strength of the light fades. The drop-down
menu lets you specify the falloff curve for the
fade (choose Inverse Square for realistic falloff
and experiment with the others). Distance lets
you specify the overall distance for the fade—
the higher the setting, the farther the light will
spread. The Sphere setting causes the intensity

Specular/Diffuse These settings let you control
whether a light will contribute to specular and
diffuse reflections. It can be handy to turn off a
lamp's specular reflections in order to add soft
illumination to an area without creating high-
lights. By turning off diffuse reflections, you
can position a light to place highlights precisely
without changing the overall diffuse lighting.