Hi to all. I am new here and I am trying to learn to use Blender again. I tried it in the past many times but I gave up. Now when I tried again it looked to me as easier to learn then it seems by the first sight. I have some problems I stumbled in the process:
Although I have checked all ‘shadow’ buttons in the scene (in rendering panel, in light panel and in material panel) there does not appear any shadow in the scene. I mean the objects are not casting or receiving shadows. What is going on? Is there, somewhere, an object properties panel which needs checking too? And if there exists such a panel how can I upload it?
How can refraction be produced in transparent materials?
How is it possible to move or rotate an object on the scene only in a direction of preference (i.e. constraining all the moves on the other directions) when someone works from the camera view?
I’m fairly new to Blender myself, but I’ll attempt a reasonable answer
Only spot lights can cast shadows, the default lamp won’t.
Haven’t covered this aspect of Blender yet myself, I think it has something to do with env maps. Someone else will explain this
The direction they rotate or move is related to how you’re looking at it. Use the different views to move objects different ways (1,3,7 on num pad show you the x,y,z axis views). Alternatively press ‘n’ with the object selected and you can manually enter it’s location properties.
For point 2 there is no built in way because blender has a renderer and not a raytracer. You only could try to fake it with textures for lamps, env maps, and stuff like this. Search for some glass tutorials at the top of this forum.
make sure that your object that casts shadows and the object that shows the shadows are both between the clip-start and clip-end of the spotlight.
Hit ‘R’ to rotate, then click middle mouse button. ‘G’ to grab or ‘S’ to scale, then move your mouse along the axis you want to constrain the movement to and MMB.
(1) also make sure that the material that’s casting the shadow has Traceable turned on. If that doesn’t work increase the ClipStart and decrease the ClipEnd of the lamp so the range only just encompasses everything it needs to.
Thanks all. I will try the solutions you referred. Although it still seems to me strange: why not making point lights produce shadows? Blender has so many features and abilities that the lack of this one looks strange, indeed.
You can make a point light with 6 linked copies of a spot with an angle of 90%, the Square option turned on and rotate them to form a cube with the shadow cones.
Hey, experimenting with making an object transparent too I stumbled to a problem. I tried to make the object transparent making use of Alpha slider in the shader control panel (I did not see any other related to tranparency command option) but whenever I rendered the image the object which ought to be transparent looked as diminishing in its ambience only, without being transparent, thats to say without revealing the objects behind. Why this happens so? And something other: does the transparent objects cast the proper semi-transparent shadows (as happens in reality)?
And, please, an easy explanation of how to install yable and use it. I use already Yafray by Dos or Bagisas gui for rendering scenes exported from Wings but I still did not find the way to make Yable work.
