Lesson 1: Lighting

Just Plane Fun

To get started, open Blender and delete the default cube. Go to the top view and add a plane (Add>Mesh>Plane). Scale it up some (S key and drag your mouse). This will be our desktop.

A Little Mood Lighting

Since we will soon be rendering to see how our textures look, we ought to go ahead and set up our lighting now. I chose to light the scene with a spot lamp to simulate a desk lamp, with objects inside and outside of the pool of light. If you don't have the default lamp in your Blender start up file, add a spot lamp now (Add>Lamp>Spot). If you have the default lamp, turn it into a spot lamp as follows:

1. Select the lamp
2. Click the Shading button and then the Lamps button
3. Near the preview window, click "Spot"

Now either way you have spot light. For now, move it above your plane and center it on the plane. Spot lights have a lot of little tweaks that can be made to them. To do as I have done, use the following settings:

1. Set the Dist. (Distance) to 65
2. Set the Energy to 3
3. Set the SpotSi to 77 - this sets the angle of the spot cone
4. Set the SpotBl to .40 - this sets the amount of blur at the edge of the spot.
5. Click on the color bar and give the light a slightly blue tint (If you want to do exactly as I have done, click on the color bar and enter E0F9FF in the box labeled Hex).

Now, in side view, move your spotlight up until the bottom of the cone is slightly above your plane, and re-center the cone on the plane. This is the primary light source for our scene.

In order to make any render in Blender look good, you need at least two sources of lighting. Our second source will be a hemi lamp. Add one (Add>Lamp>Hemi).

The hemi lamp is an omnidirectional lamp the adds light within the shadowed areas. The hemi acts much like a reflector or 'fill flash' used by photographers and cinematographers. To match the settings in my render, simply set the energy to 0.5. Note that too much hemispherical light will wash out the shadows and make them look unrealistic. Too little and the shadows become black holes.

From the front (Numpad 1), your model should look something like this at this point (you may need to scale and move the plane around to match):

And from the top (Numpad 7), like this: