Lighting and Procedural Textures

Purpose In this chapter, you will learn about the following:  Setting up a camera and lights to really show off your work  How to texture the model and work with procedural material textures A REMINDER ON TABS

Setting Up a Basic Scene Adding a Model 1. Start with the default scene and delete the default cube (RMB-select it and press X). 2. Press Shift+A, and then select Add ➤ Mesh ➤ Monkey to add the monkey primitive to the scene. 3. With the monkey selected, press R and then X, and then type the number 55 followed by Enter to make it face outward to the front view. Note that 90 degrees would make the monkey face straight ahead, but 55 degrees is the angle to correctly position the monkey so that it can sit on a ground plane, as in Figures 4–1 and 4–2.

Setting Up a Basic Scene Adding a Ground Plane 1. Press Shift+A and select Add ➤ Mesh ➤ Plane 2. Scale the plane about seven times (press S, type 7, and then press Enter). 3. Move the monkey upward (in the Z direction) so that it sits comfortably on the plane when looked at from the side view.

smooth With the monkey selected, click the Modifiers tab (wrench icon), click the Add Modifier button, and choose Subdivision Surface modifier. Alternatively, you can select the monkey and press Ctrl+1, which is the keyboard shortcut for creating the modifier. set the mesh faces to smooth shading, which makes the square faces of the mesh less obvious (press T to bring up the Tool Shelf and look for Shading: Smooth/Flat, as shown in Figure 4–3).

Aiming the Camera l Another way of lining up your view is to use fly mode by pressing Shift+F with the mouse over the 3D view. In this mode, the view pivots around to follow your mouse pointer. Using the W and S keys or rolling the MW causes the view to accelerate in and out of the scene. Clicking the LMB causes the view to halt (but keep the position), whereas clicking the RMB resets the view to the starting position.

Tracking Let’s see how to track to an object: 1. RMB-select the camera. 2. Shift-RMB-select the target object so that both the camera and the model are selected. 3. Press Ctrl+T. 4. On the menu that appears, choose Track To Constraint. 1. First, insert an empty into the scene by pressing Shift+A and then selecting Add ➤ Empty. 2. RMB-select the camera, and then Shift-RMB- select the empty. It is important that the empty is selected last, as Blender knows to make the first selected object point to the last selected item. 3. Press Ctrl+T and choose Track To Constraint.

Fixing Up the Camera View 1. Select the camera and go to the Object Data tab (when the camera is selected, this tab will appear as a camera icon), as shown in Figure 4–8. 2. Go down to the Lens section, and change the angle from 35 to something like 50 (or another setting that you prefer). The scene as viewed through the camera will appear to jump to a bigger size, but pulling the camera back to reestablish the framing of the shot will cause less distortion now, as the camera is further away.

Lighting Techniques We are now going to look at a few different ways of lighting the scene better. This section will cover the following: The types of lamps available in Blender A workflow for positioning the lights Some quick-and-dirty tricks to getting a half-decent render

Lamp Types

Lamp Settings

Example Figure 4–12. Falloff distance Figure 4–13. Changing the spot size (top three images) and then adding spot blend (bottom image)

Example Figure 4–14. Different Soft Size values applied in the shadow settings of a spotlight Figure 4–15. Different amounts of shadow samples

Procedural Materials and Textures

Using Procedural Textures

Exercise: Applying Textures