The Lamp lamp is an omni-directional point of light, that is, a point radiating the same amount of light in all directions. It’s visualized by a plain, circled dot, (Lamp Light).

submitted: 5 years and 3725 days ago

Most lamp types (Lamp, Spot and Sun) share the same options for the raytraced shadows generation, which are described bellow. Note that the Area lamp, even though using most of this options, have some specificities described in its own raytraced shadows page.

submitted: 5 years and 3725 days ago

Exposure and Range are similar to the “Colour Curves” Tool in Gimp or Photoshop.

Previously Blender clipped colour straight with “1.0” (or 255) when it exceeded the possible RGB space. This caused ugly banding and overblown highlights when light overflowed (An overexposed Teapot).

Using an exponential correction formula, this now can be nicely corrected.

submitted: 5 years and 3725 days ago

Ambient Occlusion is a sophisticated ray tracing calculation which simulates soft global illumination by faking darkness perceived in corners and at mesh intersections, creases, and cracks, where light is diffused (usually) by accumulated dirt and dust. This has the effect of darkening cracks, corners and points of contact, which is why Ambient Occlusion is often referred to as a “dirt shader”.

submitted: 5 years and 3725 days ago

Ambient light is all around us and is the result of the sun and lamps scattering photons every which way, reflecting off of and wavelengths being absorbed by objects. Rather than try to calculate the exact intensity of each and every photon, use the Ambient light settings to generally light the scene.

submitted: 5 years and 3725 days ago

Radiosity can be used also as a tool for defining vertex colours and lights. This can be very useful if you want to make further tweaks to your models, or you want to use them in the Game Engine. Furthermore the Radiosity Modelling allows for Adaptive refinement, whereas the Radiosity Rendering does not! There are few important points to grasp for practical Radiosity Modelling: Only Meshes in Blender are allowed as input for Radiosity Modelling. This because the process generates Vertex colours… and so there must be vertices.

submitted: 5 years and 3725 days ago

Let’s assume you have a scene ready, and that you want to render it with the Radiosity Rendering. The first thing to grasp when doing Radiosity is that no Lamps are necessary, but some meshes with an Emit material property greater than zero are required, since these will be the light sources. Emit is found on the Shaders panel in the bottom right (Material sub-context). Typically, a value of 0.5 or less gives a soft radiance.

submitted: 5 years and 3725 days ago

Here are some options closely related to light sources, without being lamps settings.

submitted: 5 years and 3725 days ago

The Light falloff possibilities has been improved in Blender 2.46, at least for the Lamp and Spot lamps. There are now two main controls: the Sphere button, and a drop-down list, proposing different light falloff types, as described in this tutorial..

submitted: 5 years and 3725 days ago

When a Particle Instance Modifier is added to an object, that object will be used as a particle shape on an object which has a particle system associated with it. This means that to use this Modifier you must also have another object which has a particle system on it, otherwise the Particle Instance Modifier will appear to do nothing.

submitted: 5 years and 3725 days ago