I know there must be a button somewhere .
I have ONE of my four lights showing in the viewport. Yes…in the dropdown menu I have “scene lights” toggled on . I’m getting a mostly black screen with only the geo above the grid showing as silhouetted black…but the render images look fine .
I have tried with and without a large box well outside the lights as recommended in one post I saw .
My first guess is that you are missing the world lighting in your viewport (you have the scene world unchecked)
If it is actual lights you are missing use the funnel icon in the out liner and activate the screen Icon you could have those lights disabled in viewport.
Edit,
Looking at your viewport image I am not sure why you get those tiny specks of light, are you using volume?
Enable “Scene World” in viewport shading
Thanks DNorman ! It’s only my second week using this program so if you say Blender words I likely won’t know what you mean ahaha
So…I found the button for scene world and checked it ( thank you ! )
I also went into the outliner and found the menu to display the tiny monitor icon…all were active so that’s not the issue.
I still have a black viewport…but I didn’t always…so I must have clicked something OR…that tip I read was the problem . I was reading that it’s required to created a giant cube around the entire scene / set and do the lights inside the cube. I turned OFF my cube and I suddenly have visibility for lights . Hmmmm…is it different for day or night lighting attempts ? ( use the cube for night versions ? )
my next ambition is to try two different lighting setups for day and night. ( should I be planning on using “nodes” or can I get by just with light settings do you think ? )
Hmm, not sure why they recommended a giant cube, (unless it was for volume), anyway it sounds like the cube was blocking the light.
For day and night there are different ways of doing it, you can do it with lights but you would also need to change the world lighting, world lighting gives “ambient light”.
I do not think blocking the world lighting with a giant cube is a good idea. It is better to change the world shader. One way is to use the sky texture (a dreaded NODE), in the world shader, the sky texture has a Sun and can simulate day and night by raising and setting the sun.
Yes nodes are essential.
Sooner more than later, you will have to start using nodes, you will need them to make good materials and to change the world lighting. Nodes are something you can not really avoid, if you want to learn Blender.
For the moment concentrate on shader nodes, forget about geometry nodes until you understand shader nodes and the shader editor.
Learning Blender can be intimidating, you just have to learn one thing at a time, Blender does a lot of things so there is a lot to learn!
Fabulous help DNorman…I’m watching my neighbour build a house irl but it’s his tenth one. One of the key things I realize is that he knows in which particular order to do things so he’s not caught later ( electrical BEFORE you do drywall etc )
Just knowing I’ll have to learn these two things next is a big help !
Yep learn nodes!
Here is a simple example, with the sky texture.
For day time you can just change the values in the sky texture node.
For night you could do something like this to make the sun a moon:
It is possible to animate a transition of this with a few more nodes and add stars etc but I recommend you learn the basics first!
I did a test !..I think the box idea was a cheap hack for getting quick and easy night style renders . Box turned on is immediately 2:30 am feel / box off is daytime feel :
It’s even cheaper to just turn off the world light—adding that box means path-tracing an extra object for no reason
oohhh…thanks / learning more every day !
I’m curious what you meant by turning off “world light”. Is that the same as Lighting : “scene world” and just checking that box on / off ?..if I do that on my recent build scene world checked has something of a night feeling / unchecked is a daytime feeling.
I also read somewhere that overall set scale can throw off all the settings ? The faux night lighting above works beautifully but that set was built to the default cube size.
The current set I’m working on is built to a completely different scale…I put a single point light in one spot and even at 2000 w I get almost no light effect…some but very little .
The scene world is a light source, and casts light into the scene. If you set its Strength to zero, it doesn’t have any light to cast. Adding that big cube was a roundabout way to block all the light coming in from the environment, but you don’t need to do that, since you can simply turn it off if you don’t want it.
And yes, your scene scale will affect your lighting, since Blender lights follow physical falloff—a phone flashlight will be pretty bright in a shot of a dollhouse, and undetectable in an aerial shot of a city. The default cube is 2x2m—if you build your scene to match that scale, you’ll find your lights behaving fairly predictably, but if you treat a Blender Unit as significantly larger or smaller, then you’ll find yourself having to crank your lights proportionally up or down to get something that looks reasonable.
Thanks Carterbk.
The set I’m working on originally opened where the character in place was 180 meters tall ! I manually selected all ( “A” ) and scaled it down drastically …but yes…it was still about 8 times too big. I noticed that I had to set point lights at about 5000 watts to get results…so I now scaled the entire set and everything in it as close as I could to that 2 meter cube.
The entire set was way off center from the origin of an added mesh cube too…so I moved it all over to approximately that same “spawn point” ( I’ve only been modelling about 2-1/2 weeks so forgive my ignorance of proper terms…I spent an hour confused - looking for what a “viewport” was my first few days )
The new version behaves normally now…I can set point lights at 100 watts.
I don’t have the same world menu showing as you do I’m using version 4.1 . I think I read somewhere that using a large cube outside the set was a quick hack to get good night lighting. I haven’t learned what nodes are but another member Dnorman suggested I better learn next
You don’t want to scale things to the size of the default cube itself, just know that a Blender Unit is a meter by default, and the cube is two meters (so, a little taller than a person), and use that as your guide for how big your scene should be—so if your scene is a close-up of a muffin, your muffin will probably be only a few hundredths of a unit tall, i.e. a few inches, with your camera and lights packed in tightly in only the central unit or two of your scene, and if your subject is the Empire State Building, you probably want it about 400m tall, so your camera will be much further away and your lights will be much brighter.
I have a model of a human scaled to about 1.8m that I’ll drop into scenes to make sure I’m working at a reasonable scale, but you can also just eyeball it with the knowledge that a unit is a meter.
You don’t have to work at scale if you don’t want to, but it does affect a fair number of things, like physics (it takes an object longer to fall 50m than 5m, and if your soccer ball is 25m across, it won’t behave like a soccer ball by default), depth of field (the camera operates like a physical camera, with a sensor size and focal length, and if your scene is huge or tiny, defocus won’t work as you’d expect), and, of course, light falloff, so it’s generally recommended practice, unless doing so would be more trouble than it’s worth—say, if your scene is a molecule, or a solar system.
The “spawn point” is the location of the 3D cursor—that little red-and-white striped circle with 4 crosshairs. New objects will be created at that location. In a new file it does start at the world origin (0,0,0), but it’s easy to move it elsewhere without realizing (by Shift-right-clicking), so it may or not be at the world origin, so that cube may or may not have been created at the center of the world. The world center is easy to find by looking for the intersection of the X (red) and Y (green) axes on your 3D grid floor,
I don’t have the same world menu showing as you do
That’d be because your world setup isn’t using nodes, which suggests your file was maybe originally saved in a much older version of Blender? Pretty sure the basic node setup—one Background node plugged into the output—has been the new-file default for a good long while now, so it’s odd that your file wouldn’t have that. Maybe whoever gave you the file switched it for some reason? if you click that “Use Nodes” button, your world will switch to a nodal setup.
I think I read somewhere that using a large cube outside the set was a quick hack to get good night lighting
It’s just a strange idea—the only thing that cube does is block the environment light, which is the exact same thing as setting the world to black. Not “good night lighting,” just a dark world, which could be a good first step for a night scene, sure, but doesn’t actually give you anything specific lighting-wise.
I haven’t learned what nodes are
You’re definitely going to have to do that, and on the sooner side—nodes are fundamental to a good chunk of the systems in Blender, and will only be part of more and more going forward as more systems get “node-ified”. Nodes are pretty easy, they’re just flow charts. You should really read or watch some introductory tutorials, no need to put yourself through the pain of spending days trying to understand interface basics, those’ll all be covered in any decent introduction to Blender.
Thanks so much for your time Carterbk ! Yes…It appears I may have accidentally hit shift-right click on many occasions without knowing what it does to my world . The keyboard short cuts for Toonboom software or photoshop often cause me to swear . Fortunately ctrl Z seems to be the same for all programs !
