Gingerbread Man Render Issues

Support Basics & Interface
#1

Hello everyone, I’m following the gingerbread man tutorial that’s in the user manual: (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Your_First_Animation/1.A_static_Gingerbread_Man) and I’m having a little trouble getting my render to look like theirs. I don’t know if they’ve adjusted some of the settings or what, but my render ends up looking really dark and crappy. I remember I had this problem the last time I was learning blender, I’d be following a tutorial and once the we started lighting stuff mine would always look crappy. Anyway, here’s what it’s supposed to look like:


:slight_smile:

And here’s what mine looks like:

gingerbreadman.png970×552 26.3 KB

:no:

You can see how it’s really dark. I tried adjusting the energy on the spot lamp up to 5 and it helped with the brightness, but everything was kind of washed out and the shadow was all jaggedy.

If anyone can help I’d be grateful, like I said, I can never seem to get lighting to work right in any version of Blender. Thanks.

#2

Quickly looking at the tutorial they also added a hemi lamp slightly above the camera to it to go along with the spot light and set it also to track Gus.

That could be what you’re missing is that extra light.

#3

Yeah, I got the hemi light. Here’s my blend file if anyone is willing to take a look. http://www.pasteall.org/blend/13649

#4

Just looked at your blend file. Click on your spotlight and set the fall off to inverse linear and it brightens it up tremendously.

Still unsure as to why the shadow is so jagged unless you select ray tracing under the shadow area on the spot light.

Makes me believe that they are missing a step or to somewhere.

#5

That does the trick, thank you. Yeah, I think they forgot a few steps there. No biggie.

#6

You are welcome. Hopefully when they get to the animation part there won’t be anything missing from that.

#7

edit: nevermind, fixed it.

#8

The main problem i guess is that this “2.6x” tutorial is in fact using screenshots from the render from the original version of the tutorial that was for “2.4x” :
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Manual/Your_First_Animation/1.A_static_Gingerbread_Man

in the “2.4x” tutorial, you can see that the settings used for material and lights are not the same at all from the “2.6x” version, explaining why you don’t obtain the same result as the screenshot in the end, because it’s the one that is supposed to be obtained with the settings of the “2.4x” version

#9

Ah, that must be it then. Thanks for clarifying. I’ve got it looking better now although the materials don’t look quite the same. That’s okay though. Now on to animating him!