could n e one post an example of a good realistic lighting setup, because whenever i do my lighting i always get really bad results.
This is exactly what you want, well it’s a start anyway: http://download.blender.org/documentation/html/x4029.html
This is a relatively old page so it doesn’t mention new features such as Ambient Occlusion, but it’s a good way to learn the basics of lighting.
what sort of lighting? outside? inside? calssic movie? describe youre seen.
Create 2 lamps, make one a hemisphere light and move it over your model, pointing down, give it an energy of about 0.7 and a slight blue colour. Move the second lamp up and to the side (and front a bit too) of the model, make it a spotlight and point it at your model. Give this lamp a slight yellow colour, energy of about 0.6 and raytraced shadows on.
This should give a fairly quick render with a decent light setup. It isn’t perfect, and as lighting depends on your scene and the mood you want to set there are many variations. But this is pretty good for test renders.
I’ve said this many times ofcourse… lighting is quite difficult…
As ppl said… the basic is the three-point lighting setup, wich you can find easily by just searching through any search engine and in most docs about 3D apps.
The thing is thought that most of the time when using these standard setups, the results don’t seem to be the ones desired. For this myself I use the following trick…
I start out with the basic 3 point lighting setup… wich ofcourse doesn’t give me the wanted results… then I start adding lights for shadows only and for instance for specs only… I might also add a light wich a colour for global coverage… All these things you set in blender…
Tweaking one light usually involves tweaking the others too in order to create balance… it’s a tedious task, but I’ve found that creating good lighting can take a long time… so don’t get discouraged when the results aren’t quick…
md01
if you’re making outdoor scenes the proper use of an arealight will give you very realistic shadows that get softer the farther away from the object. Havew at least 8 samples and make sure raytracing is on.