Hi, I was looking over the competition entries and winners at blenderguru.com I found this great render, which has a bright and cheerful lighting and render. I’ve been practicing, but I can’t find a simple and practical way to do this.
I know it’s done in Cycles, and that is what I am working with. I created a simple box object shape and a couple of simple shape objects to setup a similar setting. I added a single point light and adjusted some render settings as well as the world background. I’m not sure what I should do to tweak it, but as I said, I’m trying to get as an exact match to the render and lighting as possible.
Now here is my quick setup image at the end of this post which is basically nothing yet (I hope we can run this thread until I can get it just right).
My .blend scene is posted here also. If you edit it, please post it back so it is easier to see what you did, but if you only comment, I appreciate that also.
Well here’s a procedural sky gradient and cloud. Slightly better lighting, I moved the key light (which is now a plane) higher up to soften the shadows below the objects. Your turn now. Good luck!
Thanks, that works great, but for the overall illumination, I was trying to add an environment texture, not on a plane, but as a world background. I did figure it out though. Using nodes, I just add an environment texture to the world node. I tweaked it a little and found out that I was washing out the scene because I did not have a good lighting balance. Here is a quick render again, nothing spectacular, but the point is, that with the small inset in the box, I noticed that if you look at it from the angle in the picture and then the opposite horizontal angle, from where the light is coming from, it’s easier to tweak the balance between the background light emission and the lamp I’m using for the sharp shadow. So basically I render from a left and right camera angle. When the lamp is too bright, it shows better from it’s direction in the box so I lower it and noticed that after adjusting the lamp, I can adjust the environment light looking at it from the opposite angle, to properly balance it. This is not perfect, but I think if I have more objects, it will be easier to average the skylight like this. Individual lamps could be associated individually after and it will not require endless light balancing for all light sources.
I also want to recommend an excellent book I found yesterday.
Blender 2.6 Cycles Materials and Textures Cookbook. <- This book is great, it gave me a shortcut to figuring this out so far. But I still have a long way to go, so if anyone has more input on this, please post.
