First blender project, any feedback on where to go next?
Lighting help? I tried a couple of different things, most things I tried washed out the textures.
Any idea why the 2 bright dots?
Thanks!
You should add some light so we can see what is in the image.
Lighting is always tricky for someone new (and those seasoned veterans too). Renders by newbys are almost always too dark. Anyway, here are my suggestions:
- Google 3 point lighting and take a few hours to learn what it is.
- Environmental light can be used to brighten the scene and soften shadows.
- Don’t add lights for the sake of adding lights.
- Not all lights have to have all properties. For example I regularly set up extra lights that only effect specular, or that have no shadow.
- Be creative, this is YOUR world, not the real one…
Good luck, and create, create, create, it is the only way to get better.
Thanks for the feedback. Here’s an update. I actually had a key and fill light in that first one, though you can’t really tell. Putting something back in for environment lighting was the first key. Not sure the lighting isn’t still a mess but it’s a little better now. I did have a couple of extra lamps that I got rid of thanks for the tip. I was going for a sort of back painted glass on the pumpkin, didn’t really get there yet. Here’s an update:
Thanks, I actually had a key and fill light in there. I did dump a few other lights. Adding some environment lighting back in helped a lot. I had turned it off for some reason.
other than the lighting this looks really good for a first project. (from what I can see 
)
as you have been told the lighting sucks, i won’t mention it. The two white dots are what is known as “fireflies” it is just where cycles has blown out a couple of pixels, they can be easily fixed in post processing in gimp or photoshop. when you get hundreds of the blighters it can take some work to fix but there are “how-tos” around the forum
When the white(or black) dots appear, I use paint and edit them manually.
(Or use compositing techniques.)