Render Tests
You’ve probably made a few render tests during the process to see how everything was looking so far. But now, instead of just a basic, flat render, let’s perform a more elaborate render with some lights and shadows to see how Jim might look in the final render (see Figure 10.6).
1. Create a couple of lights and set their type to Sun. Rotate one of them as the main lighting source, and rotate the second one so it comes from the back of the character as a “rim light” to illuminate the borders or the part of the character that are not directly hit by the light. You can also reduce the intensity and change the color of the second light.
2. Enable the Suns’ Raytrace shadows. You can also increase the Samples to around 8 and increase the Soft Size as well.
3. On the World tab of the Properties Editor, under the World panel, change the Horizon Color. There are a few other settings you can adjust to make your render look better. You can change the background color, for example.
4. Enable Ambient Occlusion (AO) and set it to multiply: this will create some soft shadow effects and multiply them over the image to give it a more realistic lighting effect. If you want to see the effect of the AO clearly, use it in a scene that only has white materials and you’ll appreciate how cool it is. You may get a little noise in the result: in the Gather panel, increase the samples to 10 or more. Keep in mind that fewer samples render faster, but more samples give a better and less noisy result.
5. Enable Environment Lighting to add light coming from everywhere. Use a low value, just to prevent the shadow areas from being completely black, which would look very unnatural.
6. Finally, create a plane on the floor. Add a material to it and, under the Shadow panel of the material properties, turn on Shadows Only. This will display the floor shadows in the final render, but will let the camera see the background color through it as well.
