Thanks to the global illumination, a path-tracer like Cycles doesn't necessarily need big lighting setups; in fact, in the recipes we made, we only used one single Spot lamp in addition to the IBL and the results have been quite good anyway.
In Blender Internal, instead, a minimum arrangement of lamps must be done to obtain satisfying results, even with the aid of the World settings we have previously seen.
In this recipe, we are therefore going to see a classic movie three-point lighting rig, an industry standard. The effect of the main key light is enhanced by the other two lamps: the fill light, to brighten (and color) the shadow areas on the subject, and the backlight, to create a light rim on the subject edges thus making it stand out against the background.
Start Blender and load the previously saved Gidiosaurus_IBL.blend
file; if necessary, switch to the Blender Render engine by the Engine to use for rendering button in the top main header.
Gidiosaurus_lighting.blend
.Don't take into consideration the Node Editor window at the top showing the Lamp nodes under Cycles; the settings to look for are those inside the main Properties panel to the right:
Let's go with the settings of the lights:
A classic three-point lighting rig can in some way compensate for the lack of real global illumination in Blender Internal, although to obtain really good results, three lamps are usually not enough; in any case, the lighting rig of this recipe can be used as a base for even more complex setups.
When using more than one lamp in Blender Internal, we should always be sure that the shadows are enabled for all of them, unless we want particular effects; in fact, a back lamp with disabled shadows can easily shine through the model and also illuminate parts that shouldn't be in light, giving unrealistic results.
To calculate the buffered shadows, Spot lamps take into consideration everything inside their cone from the Clip Start to the Clip End values; this is why we lowered the Size values of the cones as much as possible.
One other crucial factor that can slow the calculation and the rendering times is, obviously, the size of these buffers, which we set to 4000 for each one of the three lamps; quite big, but because we set the cones that large enough to just comprehend the shape of their target object. This means we could use big shadow buffers, to obtain more details in the shadows if needed.
We do all of this, even though the Gidiosaurus was the only object to be rendered in the scene.
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