An introduction, and a quick question - missing shadow options

Support Lighting and Rendering
#1

Hi,

I’ve just started using Blender in the past few days, with a view to making a few animated short films. I’ve made fair progress using online tutorials, reading forum posts etc, but one thing is stumping me - the control options for sky and shadows under “lamps” appear when I start a new model, but dissapear when I start editing, importing models etc. This means that curently while I can add lights, I can’t edit anything other than their position and intensity. I’m currently rendering outdoor stills of a steampunk airship in flight, and obviously i’d really like to add a sky, sharper shadows etc.

The options I do have are shown on the right hand side of the screenshot. I’m using cycles render currently.

I’m fairly new to 3D art, but I have a reasonable amount of experience with CAD and game modding. I built and skinned the airship in Gmax, and imported it as a .obj file. I’m much more experienced at actual physical 3D artwork, mainly model-making.
-Matt[ATTACH=CONFIG]270034[/ATTACH]

#2

The Sky and Shadow settings are for use lamps in the blender renderer not the cycles renderer

Open the nodes options for the lamp so you can give the lamp some materials.
For the World node settings you can add a Sky Texture node

#3

Thought that might be it. I’ll give that a go, thanks.
-Matt

#4

For sharper shadows, youll want to adjust the size setting for the sun lamp. Set it lower to about .030 for starters. Also check multiple importance sample.