Lighting - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 222

Table 13-1: Settings for the Shadow Buffer Spot Lamps in
the Bat Creature Scene

Key Fill Back

Filter type Gauss Gauss Gauss

Soft 12 30 10

Bias 0.2 0.2 0.2

Sample buffers 1 1 1

Size 2048 2048 2048

Samples 16 16 16

Lighting the Eyes
Eyes are a critical part of most characters, and it's
important to make sure they're lit as you want them.
Sometimes this can mean cheating by adding some
separate lighting to the eyes to get the look you
want. For the Bat Creature, I placed the two eye
objects on their own layer (press M to move objects
to other layers) and pointed a Hemi lamp at them.
I set the lamp's intensity low (to about 0.05) so that
the lighting would come predominantly from the
existing spot lamps. Then, I turned off the light's
Specular option to prevent it from contributing to
specular reflections. Next, I turned on This Layer
Only in the lamp's settings so that the lamp would
light only the eye objects, adding a bit of extra illu-
mination to the eyes to help them stand out more.

Floor Shadows
While I didn't create a backdrop for the Bat Creature,
I knew some shadow around his feet would improve
my final render. To produce the shadows on their
own, I used the Only Shadows option for materi-
als. I added a plane to the scene and assigned a
new material to it. Then, in the materials settings,
I turned on Transparency (set to Mask), and in the
Shadows panel, I turned on Only Shadows. This
new material (shown in Figure 13-17) then renders
as just the shadows cast by other objects, with the
rest of the mesh rendering completely transpar-
ent. Later on, this will allow me to easily composite
these shadows onto the background of the final
render. I scaled the plane up to pick up all the
shadows from the Bat Creature, using the GLSL
shading mode as a guide.

Figure 13-16: A clay render of the Bat Creature using the
Material Override setting. Here, I've created a material
called Flat and assigned it to the material override in the
Render Layers panel. This technique lets you see the light-
ing of your model in isolation.

Shadows and Fur
While ray-traced or buffered shadows would both
be appropriate for most of the Bat Creature, our fur
has more specific lighting requirements. For best
results, use deep shadow buffers on each of the key,
fill, and back lights and adjust the other settings as
shown in Table 13-1.