This has been asked a long time ago by someone else, but it wasn’t answered then, and now I’m stuck with the same problem:
I am doing an outdoor scene, where I want the lighting to be like a little-bit-cloudy day. So there is a vague shadow from the sun, and also some ambient occlusion.
My first attempt was by checking the “environment lighting” option. The results were almost exactly what I wanted. The only thing is that the lighting does not go through transparent objects. So I have a truck, and the inside of the truck is black because no environment lighting goes through the glass.
Is there a way to change this setting? or a way to get a lighting that is similar to the environment lighting?
Yes,
I’f I’m not mistaken there is a “receive transparent” checkbox in the materials tab of the inside of the truck. Check this and it should work.
You could also switch over to cycles renderer.
Edit I guess you could use ambient occlusion instead of environment lighting, dunno if that will fix your problem though.
You can fake it by adding a Sun lamp to your scene and turning it’s energy down low, like 0.1. Then you get directional shadow control from the Sun and you can still use sky color for most of your lighting. In this image I intentionally set the shadow color of the Sun lamp to red so you could see what part of the shadow was created by the sun and what darker areas are produced by alternate lighting. I also added a touch of emit to the interior object (like your truck interior) to make it stand out a bit more.
The receive transparent thing didn’t help, so I ended up using the AO multiply solution. However, still it seems a bit strange to me that there is no way of setting that environment lighting can go through a material.
