I’m currently working on a short film as I learn Blender. I’ve modelled a few scenes and they look nice but I just can’t seem to get nice looking lighting to really perfect them, i’ve looked into lighting the characters with key and rim lights but can’t seem to get them working. Should I be using Cycles to Render instead or do I just need to work more in Blender Render?
If I do use Cycles what exactly are the benefits? Are most animations rendered in Cycles as apposed to Blenders render engine? Any help is much appreciated!
Thanks, so here is the scene rendered from Blender Render, it looks pretty dull and boring, especially compared to what it appears to look like in textured view, is it possible to light it like the textured view appears and would cycles be a good choice for this scene?
The first thing I notice is that the HUGE window is casting no light on the scene at all. That one change will make the entire scene look different. Maybe add a nice HDR image for more natural lighting?
It is a great start. I would suggest cycles for no other reason than I like it better. I like having more control over the materials and I feel cycles gives me that added control. Based on the “cartoonie” feel of your example, the materials in cycles would be pretty basic too.
Also, perhaps remove most of the sharp edges on things like the padded seats and table. Nothing is that sharp. And that window reflection is going to come back to haunt you at final render…
ive seen some really good example of blender internal, but needs work to get it to look closer to cycles. Cycles is real world. unless your doing animation that would take forever to render you should use cycles.
Cycles has GI, BI is only direct lighting, so you need to work on the lighting a bit more in it to get a “GI feel”, but faking global illumination is usually faster than actually using it, especially for an animation. Please post a shot of your BI lighting setup/wireframe, and I’ll see if I can help. Short answer to “…or do I just need to work more in Blender Render?” YES
Thanks for the help guys! I’ll be sure to try that @place57 and post an updated picture once I do that with a wireframe picture of the lighting setup for you @VickyM72
Cycles is much easier to get natural looking lighting and materials from, but the downside is that it’s typically slower than BI. You can get fairly realistic looking stuff from BI, but it takes A LOT of tweaking to materials, lights, shadow buffers, and ambient occlusion to get it right. But it can be worth the effort. I did a test where I rendered an animation in both BI and Cycles. They looked almost identical aside from some really subtle additional bounce lighting in Cycles. It did take a while to tweak the BI settings, but it was worth it since it rendered about 5x faster.
