Lighting - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 226

Use test renders and previews. Use Blender Inter-
nal's GLSL shading and Cycles's render preview
for real-time previews of your lighting. Do test
renders to make sure your lighting works.

General Lighting Tips
Lighting makes a big difference to the feel of an
image, and you can do a lot with lighting to change
how your subject is perceived. Here are some tips to
make your lighting render more efficiently and work
better artistically.

Less is more. Try to use fewer lights where possible
to simplify the process of tweaking your lighting
and to make it easier to see which lights most
influence your image.

Experiment. I tried a lot of different lighting setups
for all of my projects. For the Jungle Temple
scene, I tried both daylight and nighttime light-
ing, and for the Bat Creature and Spider Bot,
I experimented with many directions and col-
ors. Coming up with something good requires
experimentation.

Shadow settings. While it can be tempting to turn
up all the settings for your lamps to try to get
the nicest shadows, it's often not necessary to do
so. Experiment and try to minimize the use of
settings that increase render time significantly,
such as shadow samples and shadow-buffer

Figure 13-22: The lighting for the
Jungle Temple scene. This will later
be tweaked with some compositing
in Chapter 14.

Back light

Orange light
from tunnel

Blue fill light