Welcome to the bonus section! Here we are going to do a quick render with the Blender Internal render engine to get an idea of what the whole scene will look like. Note that this is totally optional as we are going to create a render with cycles later. In order to do our render, we will need to add a material for each object in the scene like we did for the walls but with their corresponding textures.
Now that we have all our materials created we will need to turn up the lights! Of course if you don't have light you won't see anything like in the real world.
- We add a sun lamp (press Shift + A and select Lamp | Sun) and change its color to a grayish yellow in the light settings situated in the Properties editor. We leave its energy to a value of 1. We place it behind the house and rotate it so it hits the back of the house.
- The next light we will add is point light. This one is going to be much more intense so we bump up the energy value to 20 and also change its color to a light yellow. This one will fill the scene a little bit more.
- Now we need to add lights behind the house to fake the lighting of the windows. In total we added three yellowish point lights with a value of 10 for their energy.
- The last point light we can add will be near the camera, so we would have to place it correctly after choosing our point of view. This light allows us to see a little bit more of the close environment.
- If you want to see the lighting effect in the viewport, it is best to turn off the Texture Shading mode and the GLSL option.
The final light placement
We can now choose our point of view, by moving our camera. If you don't have a camera, you can add one (press Shift + A and select Camera). You can also add many cameras and switch between them by selecting the one you want to look through and pressing Ctrl + P. In order to look through your camera in the viewport you can press the 0 numpad key. Usually it's a good habit to change the focal length of your camera in the Camera setting tab in the Properties editor (click on the Camera icon). In our case we wanted a fleeting camera so we set a focal length of 20mm.
Now in order to improve our render we will change the sky color and add a mist.
- To do that we go into the world settings in the Properties editor (click on the earth icon).
- Under the World subpanel we check the Paper sky and Blend sky option; we change the Horizon color to a dark brown color and the Zenith color to an even darker color. It's not realistic, but this image is not intended to be realistic.
- We can now check the Ambient Occlusion checkbox and set it in the Multiply mode.
- The Environment Lighting option will serves to light the scene with the Sky Color option (and not White, the default option).
- Lastly we can activate the Mist subpanel and change the Depth parameter to 30m. We also set the start option to 0. You may have to tweak those values in order to match your own scene.
- Now you can press the Render button in the Render tab of the Properties editor or press F12. Note that if you want to improve your render with some automatic compositing you can go to the Scene tab of the Properties editor and under Color Management you can use a look preset; you won't have to re-render your scene! You can also tweak Exposure, Gamma and change the CRGB (Contrast, Red, Green and Blue) curve by clicking on the Curve checkbox. As you can see, you render is displayed in a UV/Image Editor, so you can save your image (Image | Save Image as). Congratulations, you've done your first render of the haunted house!
The world settings
The final haunted house after the Blender Internal render will look like the following screenshot:
