Internal Lighting

Support Materials and Textures
1

I’m new to Blender and can’t understand how light is getting into closed objects (Blender 2.46).

I’ve setup a basic skydome shining light onto a simple cube. When I place the camera inside the cube, I would expect that it would be dark and I would not see anything. However, the render shows up the basic colour of the cube material.

I’ve done all that I can to ensure that the cube material is opaque - Translucency,Ambient reception and Emit in the Shaders panel are set to zero. The mesh is set to Double Sided in the Mesh Panel. Ambient Light for the World is zero and yet still there is light inside the cube - in fact it looks just as bright as when the cube is viewed from the outside. All other settings are standard for a new Blender session.

Am I missing something simple here?

2

I can’t explain the math but it happens. Solidifying the object fixes it - make the walls thick.

Use the Solidify Selection mesh script.
In Edit Mode, Mesh => Scripts => Solidify Selection.

3

Thanks for the suggestion. It didn’t work initially - the problem was a beginner mistake. The spots in the skydome didn’t have shadows enabled. Enabling buffered shadows partially cured the problem - but still had some light leaking in through the seams. Ray shadows worked a lot better, hardly any light got in - just enough to detect the seams.

The solidify section didn’t cut out all the light even with buffered shadows enabled, but it reduced the leaking light more than a single surface - enough for my purposes.

Thanks.