Lighting - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 225

To help spread this light further into the sur-
roundings, I created a point-lamp object with a
yellow-orange color nearer the mouth of the tun-
nel. I gave it a high intensity to light more of the
surrounding areas and set the point-light size to
1.5 to give soft shadows. These lights can be seen in
Figure 13-19.

A Note on Soft Shadows
While soft shadows look nice, they can really bump
up your render times. I ended up using quite a few
lamps with soft shadows for this scene, and as a result,
it took quite a while to render. This isn't really a
problem for stills, but bear it in mind if you want to
render an animation or if you want quick results, and
consider using lights with harder shadows or having
some lights that don't cast ray-traced shadows at all.

Fill Lighting
To add further light, I created a soft (large size)
point lamp hovering over the middle of the scene to
provide some general lighting. I also added a harder
(small size) light behind the camera and off to one
side to illuminate the foreground objects a bit. I
gave both lamps a bluish color, which lent the scene
a blue, moonlit look where it was not illuminated by
the orange light from the tunnel. (Blue and orange
also oppose one another nicely.) These lights can be
seen in Figure 13-20.

Fill lights
(blue)

Back Light
I also added some illumination from the right, com-
ing from behind the temple, to highlight the leaves
and give a slight rim light to the rocks of the temple
walls. This light comes from two lights: a long, shal-
low mesh light that illuminates mainly the backs of
the leaves and a point light that provides some extra
illumination from this direction (see Figure 13-21).
The overall effect is shown in Figure 13-22.

Figure 13-20: The temple entrance lighting combined with
some blue fill lighting

Point light
(light blue)

Mesh light
(light blue)

Point lamp
(orange)

Mesh light
(red/orange)

Figure 13-19: The lighting of the temple entrance Figure 13-21: The back lighting from one mesh light and a

point lamp