Hi there, this is Oliver from Blentus.com and in this tutorial we'll cover the second
part of the materials, light and rendering tutorial.
So let's go to Blender and I have a little scene with a monkey mesh, a plane and well
the start camera and lights. We're going to see what happens if we have no camera and
no lights. With no camera you cannot render. Okay, well let's try. I told you, no camera.
So we need to create a camera. Normally you use the one you have at the start of the project
but in this case I'm showing you how to create a new one, which is no mystery at all. Okay.
Something like this should be cool. All right. And now if we have no light, in the render
everything will appear in black. As you can see, it's everything black. So let's create
a new light. Lamp and here you have several types of lamps. Okay, the normal one is the
point lamp. Let's place it something like here. All right. And now we are going to take
a look at the light parameters. Okay, so you are here. Let's see what happens when we render.
Okay, you have light, you have no shadows. We're going to see how to tweak them right
now. You have the point lamp, which is the normal light, just a point that emits light
everywhere. Okay, in every direction. The sun is a directional light. Okay, so every point
of the scene will be illuminated from the same direction. Okay, the spot is just like
the point light, but it has a limited angle of illumination. Okay, you can configure the,
you have a preview. Okay, you can configure the smoothness of the border. Okay, with all
these options here. Well, you can take a look at them, your own. Okay, in this tutorial
I'm going to work just with a point and an hemispherical light. Hemispherical light
is just a light that emits light in one direction, like the sun, more or less, but it has no
shadows. So it's used normally for filling up a bit the dark areas in the scene. Okay,
and then we have the aerial light, the aerial lights, which are, which is some kind of rectangle
or square that emits light. But, well, let's go with the point light. As we saw before,
it has no shadows at all. So let's activate shadows. Here, ray shadows. Okay, let's take
a look now. Okay, we have shadows now. Let's position it a bit. One thing to notice here,
well, I didn't explain to you how to render an image. For rendering, you have to press
the key F12. Okay, or here you have the render panel, just press image, and you will render
a frame of the animation, the recent frame, the current frame. Okay, here you will render
an animation. Well, let's take a look at the options of the rendering. Here you have render
layers. In this, in this button, you can tell Blender where you want to make a render.
Okay, some of you may find it useful to render the image on a new window. Okay, because this
way you will have the render on a different window from the, that is not Blender. Okay,
I actually prefer to use an image editor, which is going to take the, the bigger viewport
you have in the scene, in the, in the UI, and it's going to take it as a render. Okay,
just press ask, and you will be again on the 3D viewport or whatever. Or you can do it
full screen, which is going to take all the Blender UI and change it to a, to a render
image. Okay, press ask again, and we're going to see it on an image editor. Right, here
you have the dimensions of the, of the, of the render. Okay, in this case is full HD,
but is rendered at the half, half the size. Okay, here you have the frame range from one
to, okay, the frames per second, the aspect radio. This is if you want to render just
a part of the scene, it's quite useful, because you can, with Ctrl B, I think it's, no, Shift
B, Shift B, you can render just this part. So, quite useful for checking little parts
of the render, if they work, and all that stuff. Just the activate right now, the anti
alias scene, some shading options here, if you want, for example, to make a quick render
to test the light, you probably don't need to render the textures, so the render is faster,
or the shadows, whatever. Okay, this tells Blender if the, where there, there is no mesh
at all, and you can see the background of the, of the scene. If you want to render the
sky, or if you want to render a transparent background, okay, this is normal, the normal
option I use my renders. Okay, because that way, at post production, we can add another
image on the background. Okay, here you tell Blender where to save the, the frames on an
animation. Okay, so just click here, and you can tell Blender where to save them. But if
you render just one frame, you won't need to do it. Okay, because Blender does not store
at all, it's not safe, just one frame render. You have to render it, save it manually. Okay,
so here you tell Blender, well, what format you want to use for the image, and the channels
you want. Okay, this is BNG, RGBA are quite good. Okay, and here you have some more options
like the threads you want to use of, of your computer. Post processing, you want to use
compositing or the sequencer, stamp if you want to, at the time, or statistics of the
render on the image. And this is the bake, which is another thing that lets you render
actual shadows or things on the scene, but on a texture that is part of a model. Okay,
so you project all the shadows and all the render stuff on a texture. It's pretty handy.
Okay, so once we know how to make a render, let's tweak the light. So let's have a look
again. Okay, we have the monkey, we have a very black area, and we have a very hard
shadow. So let's make the shadow softer. Here you have the soft size. You can see that it's
activated, but the samples is just one. So it renders very hard. If you want to see it
soft, you need to increase the samples. Let's take a look. Okay, here you have it softer.
But you can see that the quality is not very good. Okay, this is because we need more samples.
With 10 it should be enough. Yes, it's pretty good. And you can increase it even much more,
but you will get a lot more quality, but the render will take a lot of time. As you can
see, it's very slow right now. So in this case, we are going to use about seven or eight samples.
So you can see how it works. And here you can increase the soft size. So now they will be even
softer, but again, to see it better, you will need to increase even more the samples. Okay, well,
here you can change the color of the light. Let's put it something warm. And here the energy,
which is the, well, just that, the energy of the light you can see here on the preview. So now
it's very bright. Okay, let's put it smoother. Okay, something like this is pretty cool.
All right, this is the distance. If you activate it, here you can see the light. If you activate it
and put it, for example, let me decrease the distance, activate the sphere. And at this point,
you should see, okay, here you see the limits of the light. So from here to here is going to be
decreasing the intensity. Okay, so it's some kind of gradient. If we render right now, you will see
that here the light has a little influence already. Okay, so just increase it a bit more.
So now here it has some force, but here is the light doesn't exist at all. Increase it even more. Okay,
something like this is pretty cool. Also, in order to render quickly the previews, you can do
decrease the percentage of the original size to render. So here you will get a smaller render,
but the render will be pretty quick. All right, now as you can see, we have this bright area,
but the face of the monkey is completely black. So let's position the camera right here because I
have the option activated of creating objects aligned with the view. So let's create a lamp
and an Emmy lamp to just make a feel light that illuminates a bit the face of the monkey. Take a
look. Wow, this is a lot. Okay, note that whatever you have the view positioned, the render will
be always from the active camera. Okay, if you have more cameras, let's see what happens. Have
this another camera, but the active camera will still be the original one. You can know which
one is the active camera because in this triangle is solid. Okay, as you can see, this is on wireframe
mode. This is solid. You can make a camera active just, well, you can switch to the camera view with
zero on the Nampad. Okay, and you can make another camera active by pressing Ctrl 0. So here you
have an active camera. I think there is also another, I don't know where it is. I think there
is an option camera, camera one. Okay, here you can switch also the camera, which is the active
camera. Okay, as you can see, the triangles switch. Okay, so let's delete this one. And what else?
Oh, yeah, let's decrease the intensity of this light to something like dot one. Let's see what
happens. Okay, we are starting to see the monkey face, but it's still very, a lot of energy. So
0.05. And let's make this a little cold, something blue. Okay, even three. I don't like it at all.
But well, you can see how it works. Something like this should be enough. But what happens if we
press the point on the keyboard? So we switch the pivot point to the 3D cursor and switch the
lights like this. All right, this is a different thing. Now let's increase a bit this intensity.
Okay, but like this. All right, this is cooler than the other option. Okay, now I'm going to
show you a different kind of illumination, which is new in Blender 2.5. And I find it very handy.
Okay, so let's take the lights and switch them to another layer so we have not them here. As
you can see, it's black. Okay, so let's go to the world panel. And here you can change the
orange color. Okay, but for now, I'm going to put it in white and activate environmental lighting. Put
it to sky color. And let's see what happens. Okay, so as you can see, the light comes from
everywhere. So we get very soft shadows. As with the normal lights, you can see that we have here
just five samples. So the quality is not very good. But we can increase it in order to get better
results. Here you have them. Also, we can activate ambient occlusion. So we will get on the cavities,
some shadows and that stuff. But it's better to have it on multiply mode. So here you can see.
Let's now change the sky color. So we did something like this, orange. I like orange.
And there we go. If we now, as this one just lit it, show the light. We are mixing the
environmental lighting with a normal light. So the environmental lighting gives a feel light
that is very cool. I like it a lot. But as we now have a normal illumination on the scene,
maybe it's better to decrease this just a bit. Increase the samples to 15. And let's see what
happens. Okay, I like it. But just make the environmental lighting cold. Just to see what
happens. Okay, here we go. Let's make a final full HD render. Well, it's pretty slow. So you
know how to use lights. You know how to configure them. Well, just the basics, but you understand
them. And you know how to use the environmental light, the ambient occlusion. Okay, you can
change the samples and some options here. But, well, I recommend you to test that your own.
So you can see what happens when you change something on the parameters. And the indirect
lighting, well, in the trunk branch, I mean, the trunk is not a branch. In the trunk of
Blender, you will not have actual indirect lighting. Just approximate. Okay, so, well,
it doesn't project shadows and all that stuff. So, well, you can check the render branch. So
there you will have actual indirect lighting. But, well, I think when they merge the render
branch into the trunk, I will make a tutorial on indirect lighting. Okay, so here we have
the full HD render. It's very, very cool. And, well, that's all. See you soon and happy
blending.
