blender Lighting and Procedural Textures

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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}

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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

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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).

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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.

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Aiming the Camera



Another way of lining up your view is to

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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.

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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

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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

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Example

Figure 4–12. Falloff distance

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Example

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

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