so the hammer is in a nice centered location in the
camera viewport.
Welcome to the 2nd instalment of the Tute1XX series.
Today we are going to use that hammer created in 101 as our model for staging,
lighting, camera work and surfaceing(texturing).
OkiDoki lets get started.
Load the hammer file from before
(you DID save it didn't you??)
Make sure it is scaled so it's not to large and can be seen
in the cameras viewport
NUMPAD0
.
Diferent people like different scales to work in so whatever your comfortable with..
(smaller is better though).
The first thing we need to do is move the camera into a nice position.
Select the camera with the right mouse button. Then in the camera
viewport
NUMPAD0
hit the rotate key
RKey
and while holding down the middle mouse button,
Move
GKey
the mouse.
When the middle button is pressed, the rotation is freed up from the Y Axis.
When you have a nice angle click the
left mouse button
to accept.
Press the Grab key
GKey
and move the camera
so the hammer is in a nice centered location in the
camera viewport.
Press RENDER
F12
.
You will see a black box appear.
This is because there is no lamp light) in the scene.
A blender scene must have a lamp to make the objects visible.
Press
ESC
to get rid of the render box.
Move the 3D cursor above and to the right of the camera and
activate the top view
NUMPAD7
. Press
SPACE ADD LAMP
.
Press
F12
again to render and this time your hammer should
be looking all nice and grey and smooth!
Move to the side view
NUMPAD3
then press
F4
to bring
up the lamp properties.
Click on the Button
SPOT
to turn the Lamp into a spotlight.
(Only spotlights' can cast shadows and we want to cast a shadow here)
Now move
GKEY
the spotlight over the hammer
so the hammer is in the spotlights cone.
This cone is where light will hit objects. Any object out
of the cone will not recieve the spotlights light.
Rotate
RKEY
the Spotlight in the side and top views so
the light is falling from an angle casting nice diagnal shoadow.
Press
F12
again to render. You will notice there are still
no shadows. This is because you have to tell blenders'
renderer to render them even though shadows are selected on the lamp.
Press
F10
to access the Renderbuttons and click the shadows button.
Render again and your hammer should have shadows.
The problem you can see is that while we're getting light
from the spotlamp we still need more light for the areas
blackened by shadows.
To remedy this simply add another lamp
SPACE ADD LAMP
.
The lamp will be placed wherever the 3d cursor is.
Press
F4
to acces the lamp paramaters and slide
the energy down so its not as bright as the spotlight.
Render that and you have a nice little fill light
releiving the dark parts of before.
So we can really see what that spotlamp is doing, we'll
quickly add a plane to the scene for the hammer to cast
shadows onto. Planes are commonly used for making a ground or floor
objects.
Move the 3d cursor so it is just below the hammers handle
and press
SPACE ADD MESH PLANE
. The plane will
appear in edit mode. It will most likely be to small so
scale it with the
SKey
and make it roughly this size.
Then press
TAB
to exit edit mode and move it into position.
Now render again and you will see the floor is under the
hammer and recieving nice shadows.
If you notice the floor, the shadow is quite crisp. It would
be nice to make it a bit softer around the edges.
To do this select the Spotlamp that is casting the shadows
and press
F4
to access its buttons.
Adjust the slidebutton that reads
SPOTBL
and make it a bit higher.
Now render again
F12
and you will see a nice soft edge on that shadow!
Ok, thats probably enough to send you crazy at the moment.
Have a play around with lamps on some other scenes. See how
playing with Buffer sizes and samples can improve shadow
quality but use more ram .
And last but not least save this scene for future tutes