Final Sets and Backgrounds - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 230

● Even if you plan to use simple procedural textures on your objects, take a minute to create UV maps.
Blender has one of the easiest, highest quality UV mapping systems of any 3D package, making it possible
to create decent UV mapping for background objects within seconds. Procedural textures, if set to use
UV space, will appear as surface texturing, instead of having the “carved out” look that they often do.
● Watch the scale of your texturing. Unless you plan to use Full OSA as mentioned previously, a texture
whose scale is too small can produce a noise-like effect when rendered for animation.
Lighting
It will be hard enough to get really good lighting on your characters and sets by themselves. To try to light
them both at once will probably result in failure, or at least in running out of time before you've arrived at a
good solution. As you will be working with animation, there are some lighting techniques that will just take
too much time to render, so lighting skills and tools that you may have picked up when working on still images
will not necessarily help you. Of course, the principles of what looks good—the artistic side—remain the same.
Good illumination will help to describe surfaces, showing their shape. It should also give a sense of depth
(where depth exists) and draw attention to the important points of the scene. When lighting sets, then, that
are a background to your characters and the story, you must keep in mind that the set is (usually) not the
most important element of the shot. This is not to say that you should make your sets boring or light them
poorly, but that they should not be in a competition with your characters for visual dominance.
What Not to Use
Continuing the hard line expressed in the materials section: no raytracing. So, no ray shadows, and especially
no soft ray shadows, or ray shadows with area lamps. They make beautiful renders but take way too long.
Console yourself with the fact that most “big budget” animation projects, including feature fi lms, eschew ray-
tracing and opt for buffered shadows.
Also proscribed will be raycast Ambient Occlusion. This is the standard AO method that has been around for
several Blender versions and provides either a great “overcast day” look when used by itself or a good realistic
baseline for most other renders.
In shots in your production where the camera does not move and your set can be replaced in whole or in
part by a background image (which we'll discuss in Chapter 15), and you will only be rendering the set once
for the entire shot, you actually can use these techniques. The problem arises if you light your set with these
“high cost” tools for a shot with a stationary camera but use faster lighting tools for other shots. You will
have a very hard time maintaining a consistent look across the differing shots.
Here's a little mental script you can use as you struggle through the fi rst stages of raytracing withdrawl:
Bad you: Oh come on. Let me just use ray shadows on my area lamp.
Good you: No. Absolutely not. We have a deadline to meet.
Bad you: Give me a break. See how easy this is? Come on!
Good you: It'll take forever, and soft sampled shadows can crawl across different frames!
Bad you: I think you're just scared. You can't handle raytracing. It's too awesome for you.
Good you: I think you need some help.