Design Notes, Tutorials and Articles: Lighting in blender

finished lighting result

What is Lighting?

Lighting is a very important topic in rendering, standing equal to modelling, materials and textures. The most accurately modelled and textured scene will yield poor results without a proper lighting scheme, while a simple model can become very realistic if skilfully lit.

Why would you use it?

People use lighting in order to make their object more realistic and easier to see. It also makes your object better looking in general.

Different types of lighting:

Point:

1. In order to do this you must press shift + A and select lamp then select point then place this light somewhere on your scene

point lamp

Sun:

1. Repeat the same process that you did for point but this time select sun, you should try place this light up high and at an angle to your object in order to get a good effect

sun lamp

Spot:

1. Again, repeat the same process except select spot, you should place this above your object in order to get the desired effect. This light emits light in a cone like direction

spot lamp

Hemi:

1. Same again, repeat the process and select hemi. This is a 180® directional light which emits light downwards

hemi lamp

Area:

1. Same steps again just select area instead. This is an upward light that emits light from the plane.

area lamp

How to use Lighting in Blender

1. Press F12 for camera perspective

camera perspective

2. Then open up the world tab and tick ambient occlusion

world tab

3. Turn ambient occlusion to full

full ambient occlusion

4. Reduce ambient occlusion to 0.5

half ambient occlusion

5. Go to the Gather column in World tab

gather column

6. Adjust samples to preferred amount of samples. This makes the picture more realistic but my recommendation is not to go over 10 as it may crash your computer