The Preview panel gives a quick visualization of the active material and its properties, including its Shaders, Ramps, Mirror Transp properties and Textures. It provides many useful shapes that are very useful for designing new shaders: for some shaders (like those based Ramp colors or a Diffuse shader like Minnaert), one needs fairly complex or specific previewing shapes to decide if the shader-in-design achieves its goal.

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In this section we look at how to set up the various material parameters in Blender, and what you should expect as a result. We also give hints about practical material usage.

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A rig is a standard setup and combination of objects; there can be lighting rigs, or armature rigs, etc. A rig provides a basic setup and allows you to start from a known point and go from there. Different rigs are used for different purposes and emulate different conditions; the rig you start with depends on what you want to convey in your scene. Lighting can be very confusing, and the defaults do not give good results. Further, very small changes can have a dramatic effect on the mood and colours. At major studios, lighting is an entire step and speciality. Well, let’s get out of the darkness of confusion and let me enlighten you.

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This panel allows you to enable a new effect that simulates various properties of real sky and atmosphere: the scattering of the sun light as it crosses the kilometers of air overhead. Let's learn more about it and about what it can do ;)

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A Sun lamp provides light of constant intensity emitted in a single direction. In the 3D view the Sun light is represented by an encircled black dot with rays emitting from it, plus a dashed line indicating the direction of the light. This direction can be changed by rotating the Sun lamp, as any other object, but because the light is emitted in a constant direction, the location of a Sun lamp does not affect the rendered result.

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The Hemi lamp provides light from the direction of a 180° hemisphere, designed to simulate the light coming from a heavily clouded or otherwise uniform sky. In other words it is a light which is shed, uniformly, by a glowing dome surrounding the scene (Hemi Light conceptual scheme).

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The Area lamp simulates light originating from surface (or surface-like) emitters, for example, a TV screen, your supermarket’s neons, a window or a cloudy sky are just a few types. The area lamp produces shadows with soft borders by sampling a lamp along a grid the size of which is defined by the user. This is in direct contrast to point-like artificial lights which product sharp borders.

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The Halo button allows a Spotlight to have a Volumetric effect applied to it. This button must be active if the Volumetric effect is to be visible. Note that if you are using buffered shadows, you have extra options described in the “Spot Buffered Shadows” page.

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Spotlights can use either raytraced shadows or buffered shadows. Either of the two can provide various extra options. Raytraced shadows are generally more accurate, with extra capabilities such as transparent shadows, although they are quite slower to render. Buffered shadows are more complex to set up and involve more faking, but the speed of rendering is a definite advantage.

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A Spot lamp emits a cone shaped beam of light from the tip of the cone, in a given direction.

submitted: 5 years and 3724 days ago