blenderart magazine issue 27 shadow showdown

Issue 27 | Apr 2010

Blender learning made easy

COVERART Living Room - by Victor Phellipe

Fun with Shadows

Mesh Lights

Studio Pack Shot

Using Textured Light to Spice Up a Scene

EDITORGaurav Nawani [email protected]

MANAGING EDITORSandra Gilbert [email protected]

WEBSITENam Pham [email protected]

DESIGNERGaurav, Sandra, Alex

PROOFERSBrian C. TreacyBruce WestfallDaniel HandDaniel MateHenriël VeldtmannJoshua LeungJoshua ScottonKevin BraunMark WarrenNoah SummersPatrick ODonnellPhillipRonan PosnicScott HillWade BickValérie Hambert

WRITERSSandra Gilbert (aka dreamsgate)Francois Deretz (aka DEF13)Daniel HandWilliam MeadorGaurav Nawani

COVER ARTLiving Room - by Victor Phellipe

CONTENTS

www.blenderart.org Issue 27 | Apr 2010 - "Shadow Showdown - Achieving Light/Shadow Balance"

2

Fun with Shadows

I finally get it ! - Ambient Occlusion

Mesh Lights

Studio Pack Shot

Robbie the Robot

Using Textured Light to Spice Up a Scene

Lighting the Vault

5

7

10

12

16

21

23

Lighting Troubleshooting Tips 25

mailto:[email protected]



www.blenderart.org

This quote, while a bit odd in a 3d maga-zine, is an apt description of my mentalstate every time I get to the lighting stageof a project.

To say that lighting is not one of my fa-vorite tasks is something of an understate-ment. Not only has it been the mostunpleasant part of any project, for manyyears it actually resembled a full out battle.Often taking far more time than the entirerest of the project. And more often thannot, I simply gave up at a point where itlooked barely passable out of sheer frustra-tion.

Years of research, study, books, tutorialsand very stubborn persistence have allowedme to finally achieve better results. At thispoint I have progressed from "barely passa-ble" to "almost got it". And yet I still dreadthe lighting phase of any project, even morethan rigging, and we all know my issueswith that.

Knowing my dislike of lighting, you wouldthink that lighting would be one of the lastthings I would want to discuss. Yet oddlyenough, I have been looking forward to thisissue. I relish adding new tips and tech-niques to my lighting battle "war chest".Knowledge is a powerful weapon and I willgladly take all the help I can get.

That being said, we have gathered up a verynice arsenal of tips and lighting tutorials tobetter arm you for your own lighting bat-tles. So cozy on up for what is sure to be anenlightening experience

[email protected]

Sandra GilbertManaging Editor

EDITORIAL 3



Having decided that the best way to get up tospeed with Blender 2.5, was to just start us-ing it on projects. So for the last couple of

projects that is exactly what I have done. With a bitof poking around, I got past the "stumbling aroundlooking for familiar tools and options" stage. Whichwasn't nearly as painful as I anticipated it would be.

So having figured out modeling and textures, Istarted poking aroundin the lighting options,while working on mylatest project.

I was relieved to see,that for the most part,lighting still looked fa-miliar. Which was ahuge relief as I havegone to a great deal ofeffort to learn how touse Blender lightingoptions, and I wasdreading the task ofrelearning at all.

So I proceeded to setup my lighting, when Inoticed a new optionunder Spot Lamps."Show Cone"

hmm.... that wasn'tthere before. Wonderwhat it is for. Yes Ipromptly clicked it tosee what it did.

That "Show Cone" option was "highlighting" my spotlamps area of influence. While it didn't tell me how

bright mylamps were,it was show-ing me ex-actly whatwas in thepath of thespot Lampand whatwasn't. (fig37) Some-thing the dashed lineskind of did, but not asvisually obvious as the"Show Cone". Now Ifind that very cool anduseful.

So far it only seems tobe an option on SpotLamps, trust me Ilooked once I figured itout. But then again theSpot Lamp seems tohave more options thanthe other lamps anyhowdue to the nature oftheir functions.

And there you go, a verypleasant surprise forme, that will makelighting a bit easier toset up and adjust

IZZY SPEAKS : Show cone 4


So, I proceeded to set up mylighting, when I noticed anew option “Show Cone”.

IntroductionI have always loved shadows. They adddetail and depth to scenes. Depending onhow they form, they can create mysteri-ous patterns and often create imagesthemselves. They can also be used togreat effect as a special effect to high-light or focus your attention on an objector character.

One wayto useshadows

as a special effect isto change theircolor. I am going toshow you a fewways to change thecolor of shadows.First you need ascene of course anda lighting set up toplay with. I startedwith a very basiclight set up. Thereare three spot lights:

One spotlight (mainspot) set up behindthe camera

2 linked spots set tothe sides

And a little AO forinterest While thisset up works rather

well on it's own, it is also a great starting point for alittle shadow fun.

Using Nodes

I set up my render passes to give me a "Combinedand a Shadow pass". Then I opened up the Node Edi-tor and started getting it all set up.

Quick Rundown:

Render Layer panel

Shows the combined (original) image connec-tions:

Connect Image to 1st Image socket on Mix Node

Connect Shadow to Image socket on RGB CurveNode

1a, 1b & 2a are Viewer Nodes to show you whateach step produces.

RGB Curve Node the RGB curve is used to adjustthe color of the Shadow

Connect Image to 2nd Image socket of Mix Node.

Mix Node

Takes the original image and the color correctedshadow image and combines them into a new im-age.

Okay, time to Render, making sure that"Compositing'' is checked in the 'Post Processing'panel of the Render buttons.

3D WORKSHOP: Fun with Shadows

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Fun with shadows

Well the shadows are definitely Blue, but they nolonger have that soft blended look. Something that ren-dering out and adjusting additional passes (such as AO,Environment and Indirect Lighting) would take care of,in addition to perhaps a blur nodeor two for blending.

The fun thing about the abovemethod, is that once you haveseparated out the shadow pass,you can replace it with a com-pletely different shadow pass tocreate some cool special effects.Imagine an everyday characterwith a monster shaped shadow.How cool would that be.

Lamp by Lamp

A simpler way to change shadowcolor is to change it on each lampin your scene. This resulted in avery nice effect. The shadows castby the three spots rendered asblue, leaving the AO shadows anice soft gray.

This would be an effective way tobring focus to one or two elements inyour image.

Sky & Texture

But what if you wanted all the shad-ows to be blue. Well that is very easytoo.

Change your Environment setting from"white" to "sky texture". Change yourmain spot light to Sun.

In the "Sky & Texture" panel select

"Mountain" leaving everything else atdefault and render.

Now all shadows are various shades ofBlue and you still have your softblended shadows. This is just a fewways that shadows can be altered, allof the above methods can be com-bined and adjusted as needed for whatever you could need.

To ends my shadow fun adventure. Ihope enjoyed yourself and learned athing or two

3D WORKSHOP: Fun with Shadows

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IntroductionBack in the day when I started usingBlender, global illumination requiredsome creative work-arounds. The mostpopular being a low power, duplicatedspot lights parented to a 1/2 an ico-sphere.

For the time, it was a great solution. Youcould create nice lighting and soft over-lapping shadows with a very reasonablerender time. And best of all, it was some-thing I could set up easily and use effec-

tively. As time went on, coders added a new lightingoption, Ambient Occlusion (AO). It created nice evenshadows and added overall lighting, but it wasrather slow and a little confusing to set up withouta cheat sheet. So many users (myself included) stuckwith the duplicated spot light method.

More time passed, and the ambient occlusion op-tions were refined and sped up considerably. Whichwas great, unfortunately for me, it was still ratherconfusing to set up unless I had a cheat sheet. Andeven with a cheat sheet, I generally didn't get resultsI liked.

So when 2.5 came out I decided to play with the lat-est incarnation of Ambient Occlusion. Hoping thatsomehow it might actually make sense. Oddlyenough, although it still has the same options, thenew lay out and grouping makes it seem far lessconfusing for me. Something I am attributing to thefact that now I can clearly see just what goes withwhat.

What was once stuffed all into one panel, now occu-pies four separate panels. So let's take a look atwhat we now have. This is a simple scene with nolamps added yet. We are first going to look at eachsection in separately.

Ambient Occlusion:

Multiply of course is going to multiply any shadowsyou already have. Since there are no lamps in thisscene, you get a black image.

Add brings more light into your scene, so even withno lamps present you get a lighted image.

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I Finally Get it! - AO

Environment lighting

Environment light-ing adds light basedon one of three op-tions, White, SkyColor or Sky Tex-ture. You can con-trol how muchlight is added withthe energy slider.

White adds evenwhite light

Sky Color addswhatever color yousky is

Sky Texture addsany textures youmight have set forthe world in addi-tion to the skycolor, such asclouds.

Indirect lighting

Indirect lightingwill provide thebouncing of lightfrom one object toanother. It doeshowever requirethat light actuallybe present. And inour case, no lampsmeans no bounc-ing of light.

Gather

The "Gather"panel gives youtwo options forgenerating AO,Raytrace andApproximate,with Approxi-mate of coursebeing muchfaster. So it is amatter of whatyou prefer as towhich you usefor the gather-ing method.

Having it all split out like this, made it much easier forme to see what effect setting changes made on my im-age.

Now that it finally makes a little more sense and ismuch easier to see what is doing what, let's put it alltogether.


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Even with no lamps added, youalready have the start of somepretty good lighting.

Of course adding lamps will addimpact and allow you to high-light or focus attention on cer-tain details of your image.

One more added bit of fun, Envi-ronment Lighting can be affectedby Sky & Atmosphere settingsunder the Sun lamp settings. Sogo ahead and add a Sun Lamp,position it anywhere you want.

Scroll down to the Sky & Atmos-phere panel and toggle it On,there are a couple of presets thatyou can chose from, or you canexperiment and come up withyour own.

In the Environment Lighting pan-el, set it to either Sky Color orSky Texture and render.

Since there is now a lamp in thescene, you may want to loweryour settings in the AO, Environ-ment Lighting and Indirect Light-ing panels, especially if it seemsto bright.

Well there you go, doesn't thatseem so much easier?


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IntroductionAs an artist, what could be more fun thanmaking objects glow and cast light with-out having to worry about where to skil-fully place appropriate lamps. In myopinion, not much.

The addition of Mesh Lights allows an art-ist to make any object they have createdglow with a mysterious magical light.

I foresee numerous fairy lights, swords,jewels and magical items glowing theirway into a fair share of future images.

And while magical items that glow are too fun toignore, mesh lights can also provide that addedtouch of realism to everyday objects. Something wewill all get around to exploring once we have gottenover the "oooh, it glows" phase of playing. I figuremost of you should be ready for that by next Christ-mas (maybe :P ). So let's make some Christmas treelights.

(Jonathan has an excellent tutorial for modeling re-alistic Christmas tree lights at BlenderCookie.com)

We are going to start off witha simple model of a Christmaslight.

Next up we add some materi-als. I created a simple mattegreen for the light base and afairly simple red glass for thebulb.

The red glass is only slightlytransparent, as most of the

Christmas bulbs I have seen aren't overly seethrough. The most important part of this material isactually the "Emit" value. That is what is going tohelp it glow. I set mine to 0.25. I did a lot of testingand decided I preferred lower values. But I encour-age you experiment and find a setting that appealsto you.

3D WORKSHOP: Mesh Lights

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Cricket and Friends See a Comet!


Mesh Lights

www.BlenderCookie.com

I have the Christmas light sit-ting on a simple backdrop, sowe can see the light beingcast by the Christmas light.The backdrop has a defaultgrey material that I loweredthe Spec values on.

Okay our Christmas light isready, just one more settingto create our glowing master-piece.

Over in the World buttons,scroll down to IndirectLighting and toggle it on.

I set the Factor to 50.00.Again that was a personalpreference, you mightwant more or less thanthat. And Bounces to 2.

Right under the Indirect Light-ing panel is the Gather panel.The settings I used are:

Approximate Falloff of 2.00Pixel cache toggled on

Okay time to see what we endedup with.

Well look at that, it glows andcasts a nice light. But just the onelight and the fact that the light isred, makes the image look verydark. A little added light wouldimprove this image.

So let's add a little AO and Environment Lighting.

You'll notice that I set the Envi-ronment Lighting rather low.Ijust want to lighten things upwhile still being able to see myglowing red light. (fig lightwith AO). Well that looks a lit-tle better.

But I think that one Christmaslight sitting there all by itself,looks rather sad and lonely. Soduplicate several more. Youcan change the colors if youwant for more visual interest.

Since the added Christmaslights will of course add morelight to the scene, go aheadand turn AO. and EnvironmentLighting Off.

When you have the lights ar-ranged in a nice way, go aheadand hit that render button.

Well that ispretty enough touse as a Christ-mas card

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IntroductionI'd rather spend my time reviewing set-tings for studio lighting to make a niceimage of a single object, especially whenyou have to manage glare on chrome ob-jects! Recognizing this loss of time, Ithrew myself into the design of this studiopack shot. A pack shot is a high qualityphoto of a product on a solid backgroundin most cases, used to present said prod-uct in a product catalog.

This is a real illustration for a pack shot (+soft box studio settings). This is exactly what Iwanted to create in Blender ...

Pack Shot Studio for Blender is a virtual solutionthat simulates the effects of shooting an object:light scattering, reflections of the flash on the re-flective material, ad-justment of the focalblur ...

Although the process ofimage production hasbeen greatly simplified,it is necessary to havesome knowledge in 3Dand the Blender envi-ronment to better un-derstand Pack ShotStudio. Knowledgeabout studio photogra-phy is a plus.

File content

You will find in this file:

3 lamp types witheach one havingat least one Tar-get to aid target-ing, adjustmentfor distance andenergy and adjustcolor of the lightin the 3D view.

A "Flash" like a "Soft Box" which includes anadjustable light box (square or round).

It's good for soft illumination without specular ef-fect and maximum diffusion shade.

It also creates a square or a round reflection on ob-ject.

A "Flash" studio with adjustment outreach di-rectly in the 3D view.

It's a good way for lighting effects mixed with spec-ular shading and rough shading.

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Studio Pack Shot

A neon "Flash" studio

For soft lighting and specular both, perfect for a garageeffect on a car body.

It creates a neon tube reflection and a relatively stronglinear specular reflection on object .A customizableshooting table.

A Camera with a target, an Auto-focus (coupled toTarget or manual) and a zoom ring.

A node for development (rendering) that allows themanagement of focal blur based on the settings ofthe camera. It also adds a slight defect to the lensto accentuate realistic rendering.

File Architecture

First, let's see how I structured my file.

We have to take a unit for 3D / perspective = 1 unit oflocal measurement.

We will use metric system, so a unit is 1 meter.

In a case where the scale of your object is different fromthe studio, scale the import object in the studio.

Set the shadow samples of "flash", do not abuse this set-ting (make it too high) because of rendering time! Asample from 4 to 8 is a good average.

Consider the sample settings of the Ambient Occlusion,especially recommendations for the "flash". Values from4 to 8 are good averages.

Let's start by opening the file. First, check that the set-tings are all enabled for replication ([i] User Preferences>Methods Edit> Duplicate With Object) to avoid problemswhen duplicating a standard "flash" (Shift + D).

The Studio consists of three areas of work and informa-tion on where we are. To select a workspace simply acti-vate the menu with the prefix [SR:].

1. Composing the Scene

Let's enter the scene, choosing the scene menu and se-lect scene 1. This space is used for positioning objectsand settings and flash in the studio.


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Activate the layers 1, 16 and 18, show suzanne, table andflash soft box.

What makes up the layers in the Studio?

1. Suzanne Material Tester

2. Sphere Material Tester

3. Glass Material Tester

11. Hyperfocal Bak-ing Sphere. For usein the workspace: 3hyperfocal Bake

16. Shooting Table:Visible Objectsframe = Table / Ob-ject Table

17. Camera: VisibleObjects = FrameCamera / CameraCAM / Z Subjectmeter

18. Flash Soft Box:Visible Objectsframe = Soft Box /Object Soft Box /Lamp Soft Box

19. Direct Flash:Visible Objects =Flash Frame Direct /Direct Flash Object/ Lamp Direct Flash

20. Neon Flash: Vis-ible Objects =

Frame Neon Flash / Flash Object + Map Dupli Spec Neon/ Neon Flash Lamp (no spec) / Neon Flash Lamp Spec (nodiffuse)

How to duplicate a group flash?

Method 1: Simple Duplication

The flash will duplicate independent settings of the du-plicated flash.

Select any object that makes up the "flash" to dupli-cate.

Make Shift + G> In Same Group or Object In SameGroup.

Make SHIFT + D: All the information from the"flash" is duplicated.

Note: I strongly recommend starting the selection proc-ess from the frame.

Method 2: Multiple Copying

A single "flash" (parent) controls a set of "flash"(children) of the same type.

Create any object on any layer, an Empty is the sim-plest.

In the panel: Window Buttons> Object (F7)> AnimSettings and activate DupliGroup.

In [GR:], type GR "The Name Of The Flash. example:GR: GR Soft Box

The DupliGroup appears behind the object that du-plicates it.


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Create a plane that you subdivide(be reasonable in the subdivision,avoid large values).

Parents who used to be DupliGroupthis plane.

Keep only the plane selection.

In the panel: Windows Buttons> Ob-ject (F7)> Anim Settings and activateor dupliverts DupliFaces.

Your flash original is duplicated foras many vertices or faces that makeup the plane. The settings of theseclones will be totally dependent on"flash" original.

2 Light Room : Configuration space ofthe initial rendering and rendering com-posite.

3 Hyperfocal Bake : Make a record 360 °x 360 ° of your scene and save the result-ing image into a background imageHDRI.

This process will be a little long depend-ing on the size of the rendering.

Conclusion

I hope you will enjoy using this studio. I still have toadapt it to Yafaray and Luxrender and make a version forBlender 2.5x (too many bugs for the moment - even withthe Alpha 2). You can follow progress on the topic ofBlenderClan

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)Francois Deretz(aka DEF13)

I was born in 1976 and I started mycareer as a graphic designer in 1998.I am now a freelance art director andwith the help of my wife, am build-ing a little visual communicationsagency specializing in the fields ofwatches and jewelry -(http://www.cb-visualdesign.fr ;http://www.flickr.com/photos/def13_marseille/sets/ ).

I discovered Blender version 2.26and included it in my working proc-ess during the release of Version2.32.

We pack a lot of shots in our studioand took reflexes management oflight and reflections that I could notfind in Blender. That's how the ideawas born of a file "Photo Studio" inBlender

http://blenderclan.tuxfamily.org/html/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=24229&viewmode=flat&order=ASC&start=0

http://www.cb-visualdesign.fr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/def13_marseille/sets/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/def13_marseille/sets/

IntroductionModeling of mechanical objects inblender is a great way to improve yourmodeling and rigging skills and is ofteneasier than modeling purely organic ob-jects. In this tutorial, I will guide youthrough a high-level approach to creatingan anthropomorphic robot charactercalled Robbie.

Reference Images and Sketches

I used several sources of inspiration whensketching Robbie, ranging from movies such as“Robots”, by Twentieth Century Fox to the almostlimitless supply of images provided by Google.While the reference movies and images helped de-velop the sketches, I found small model robots, sim-ilar to what you may find in a toy shop, the mostuseful for understanding how the various jointsworked.

Figure shows the finalsketch that I used asthe basis for the model.While the sketch isquite basic and is poseddifferently to the finalrender, the essentialcharacteristics and rel-ative proportionsshould be clear to see.One of the decisions that I made early on in the de-sign process was that Robbie would be a friendlylooking robot and have certain human-like qualities.

It is for this reason that he has large eyes and hisjaw was modeled to appear like he is smiling. Ana-tomically, he loosely matches that of a human, butyou'll notice that his arms are disproportionate insize with his legs and body.

The reason for doing this was two fold, firstly Iwanted to give him a bit more character and experi-ment with the idea of him being a robot. The sec-ond reason was to make future animation of themodel easier as it's far more difficult to convinc-ingly animate a model with exact human propor-tions.

Modeling the Skeleton Framework

The modeling process started with creating the ba-sic skeleton framework. While most of the skeletonwould later be hidden from view, I used it as a guidewhen modeling the visible parts of Robbie and laterin the rigging process.

Each component of the skeleton frame started offas a simple primitive object such as a UV-Sphere orcylinder. Placement of the ball and socket joints wasachieved using Blender's "Snap Cursor to Object"and "Snap Object to Cursor" operations.

The ball and socketjoints were createdfrom a UV-Sphere with12 segments and 12rings [12,12].

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Robbie the Robot

The socket joint was modeled by selecting the thirdedge-loop [Alt-Right Mouse Button] as shown in figure002, duplicating [Shift-D] it, separating [P] it from theparent object and then using a series of extrudes [E] andscaling operating [S, Shift+X] to create the taperedsocket joint as shown in figure 003. Creases were addedby placing loop-cuts [Ctrl-R] in close proximity to exist-ing geometry. Smoothing was added to both the jointsand sockets and a sub-surface modifier was added tothe socket joint.

After creating thefirst socket joint, itwas then dupli-cated [Shift-D] androtated [R] aboutthe centre of theball. Each ball andsocket joint in themodel is simply ascaled linked dupli-cate of these threeobjects. Using thissimple ball and socket joint, together with open cylin-ders consisting of 12 segments, I created the skeletonframework as shown in figure 004.

Modeling the Head

I wanted Robbie topossess human-likecharacteristics andto look friendly. Itherefore decidedto give human-likeeyes and modelledhis jaw such that itappeared that hewas smiling. The

head started life as a UV-Sphere[12,12]. Half of the verti-ces were removed and a mirror-modifier about the x-axis was added.

I created the jaw by se-lecting the faces shownin figure 005, duplicated[Shift-D] and separated[P] them and extruded[E] the region. Addi-tional detail was addedto the jaw by addingloop-cuts [Ctrl-R]around the axis of rota-tion as shown figure 006 and extruding [E] a face to re-semble a tooth.

I'm not not going to cover how to create Robbie's eyesin this tutorial as there are some great eye tutorialsavailable on-line and in previous publications of BlenderArt magazine.

I did however en-hance the eyes byadding a bottomeyelid and placed atapered cylinderabove each to act asan eyebrow. Whencreating the eyesocket, the aim is tocreate a realistichole in the mesh without generating ugly geometry. Iwas able to keep the mesh clean by deleting [X] one ofthe faces and selecting the resultant edge-loop [Alt-RightMouse Button], snapping the cursor to object [Shift-S]and selecting "To Sphere" from the "Mesh Tools" menu.The edge-loop was then scaled slightly to accommodatethe eye as shown in figure.


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Robbie's nose was created using the bolt factory wizardlocated in the scripts menu. The default settings createa bolt with a lot of geometry, especially around theshaft of the bolt. As most of this will be hidden fromview, I deleted itand replaced itby extruding [E]the edge-loopwhere the shaftmeets the headof the bolt.

The head wascompleted byadding a low-poly bolt to each side. The low-poly bolt was createdfrom a UV-Sphere[12,12] where half of the sphere is de-leted and the largest edge-loop extruded and scaled in-wards. It was then extruded once more to form thecylindrical section of the bolt as shown in figure 008.The slit in the top of the bolt was created by extruding[E] some of the faces inwards along their normals.

Modeling the Upper Body

The upper body started life as a cylinder[12] with its ma-jor axis aligned along the z-axis. Once again, half of thevertices were removed and a mirror-modifier about thex-axis was added. A succession of loop-cuts [Ctrl-R]added along the length of the cylinder along with scal-ing [S,Shift-Z] formed the basis for the object. Once Iwas happy with the proportions along the z-axis andx-axis I switched to the side-view and scaled all theedge-loops except the ones at the top and bottom of thecylinder.

This improved the proportions of the upper body.Creases were added as described earlier in this tutorial.Once I was happy with the general geometry of the up-

per body I selected the upper section as shown in figureand separated it from the lower section. This wouldlater allow me to place Robbie in a more natural pose byplacing an arch inhis back.

A plate was addedaround Robbie'sneck to provide alittle more detail tothe model. Thiswas comple-mented with a fewlow-poly bolts asused earlier onRobbie's head. A close up of the plate is shown in fig-ure.

Modeling the Lower Body

Robbie's lower body was created from a cube with onelevel of sub-division [W] and all vertices with negative xor y coordinates deleted and a mirror-modifier added forboth the x-axis and y-axis.

The cube was positioned as shown in figure and thebase of the cube scaled [S,Shift-Z] inwards while beinglocked in the z-axis. A total of seven loop cuts wereadded to the cubeto create the ge-ometry shown infigure 011. Thelower body wascompleted by add-ing four low-polybolts, two to thefront of the objectand two to therear.


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If you look carefully at the bolts, you'll see that each hasvarying degrees of rotation to increase realism. Thebolts not only help to complete the model but also cre-ate some nice shadows during the render stage.

Modeling the Arms and Hand

The upper and lower arms were each created from acylinder[12]. Three edge loops [Ctrl-R] were added to thecylinder and scaled [S] outwards to add some definitionand a smooth contour. Additional geometry was addedto the upper-arm around the shoulder by selecting thesix edges asshown in figure012 and extrud-ing [E] themthree timeswhile tracingout a curvedsurface aroundthe shoulderjoint. Additionalgeometry wasadded to thelower arm inexactly the sameway as shown infigure, but thistime it was toprotect the el-bow joint. Mi-nor adjustmentswere made tothe arm whileviewing themodel from var-ious angles and finally a sub-surface modifier was addedto each object and smoothing applied to each of the fac-es.

Robbie's handsare based on aflattened Cubewith two edge-loops [Ctrl-R]placed at the lo-cations of eachof his three fin-gers as shown infigure 014. Addi-tional geometrywas extruded [E] from the side of the cube where thethumb would later be attached. The fingers and thumbsare each based on Robbie's arm skeleton, with an addi-tional tapered cylinder[12] added to each to form thefinger tip. Each of the digits were attached to the handand placed in a natural pose.

Modeling the Legs and Feet

The upper and lower parts of Robbie's legs were createdin exactly the same way as Robbie's arms, actually, I du-plicated [Shift-D] the arms and tweaked each of theedge-loops to get the desired geometry. The only minordifference between the arms and legs is that the legsbends in the op-posite directionto the arm andtherefore it wasnecessary to ro-tate the lowersection of theduplicated arm.A detailed viewof the geometryof the Robbie'sleg is shown infigure.


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Moving on to the last part of the model, Robbie's feet. Itshould be of no surprise that each foot was createdfrom a UVSphere[12,12] with half of the faces deleted [X]and additional faces added to form the sole of the foot.A sub-surface modifier was then added along with anedge-loop around the base of the foot to create a solidcrease and flat sole.

The foot was thenscaled [S, Y] alongthe y-axis to elon-gate the foot andgive Robbie greaterstability. The toe-cap on each footwas created in asimilar way to howI created Robbie'sjaw. The facesshown in figure 016were selected, duplicated [Shift-D], separated [P] and ex-truded [E] to create the new region. Additional edge-loops [Ctrl-R] were added to the toe-cap around the axisof rotation and finally sub-surface modifiers andsmoothing was added to each part of the foot. As a fin-ishing touch, I added two low-poly bolts to each foot,one on either side of the foot to give the foot the samelevel of detail as Robbie's jaw.

Finishing Up

The final step in the modeling process was to duplicate[Shift-D] all the objects on Robbie's left hand side andmirror them about the x-axis [Ctrl-M,X], while ensuringthat the 3D cursor was located at the origin.

So there you have it, a high-level guide to creating ananthropomorphic robot character called Robbie usingprimitive geometrical objects in Blender.

For those of you interested in watching a series of videotutorials going through each of the stages outlined inthis tutorial, as well as rigging, lighting, UV-mapping,texturing and composite rendering of Robbie, pleasesubscribe to my Vimeo channel "Robbie The Robot"http://vimeo.com/danieljhand/channels


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http://vimeo.com/danieljhand/channels

Textured Lights

IntroductionTextured (or dappled) lighting provides ascene with extra depth and interest, itcan enhance the mood of a scene, and itis an opportunity to expand a space byletting the audience know that there ismore to it than what is just seen in thecamera's view. Textured lighting in thereal world can be seen as sunlight passesthrough clouds, trees and plants, andarchitectural elements, such as arbors,glass and steel walls, truss work, etc.This article outlines the real world tech-

nology used to create dappled light and providesinsights into using these ideas in a blender sceneusing texture projections.

Real World Textured Light

Common terms for texturing light in the entertain-ment industry are “gobo” and “cuculoris” or“cookie.” Don’t let anyone tell you they know whatgobo means. Some say “goes between,” others say“goes before (the objective lens),” but just knowthat it means a pattern that is projected with alighting instrument. Gobos specifically need an el-lipsoidal reflector spotlight (ERS). An ERS has thegobo, and shutters to crop it, at the second focus ofits ellipsoidal reflector. The light source is at thefirst focus. Add a lens that can be adjusted towardsand away from the gobo and one has an instrumentthat can project an image as sharp or diffuse as de-sired. Cookies generally sit in front of a lighting in-strument rather than inside the instrument. Sharpor diffuse qualities of the projection are based onhow close or far the lighting instrument is from thecookie. Gobos tend to be just a few inches in diame-

ter, whereas cookies are often as large as a few feeton a side.

Virtual World Textured Light

Not unlike the real world, in the virtual world tex-tured lighting can usually be added in two ways.One is to pass light through geometry and let thegeometry and materials cast shadows into thescene in a similar manner to the cookie. The otheris to use projections via textures in a light source,which is similar to gobos. Passing light through ge-ometry works well, but can be computationally ex-pensive and it can often take a lot of time to create.Using projections requires some work in an imageediting application, but little else is needed to getthem to work. This article focuses on using projec-tions for textured lighting.

Textures

What should a gobo/light texture look like? In theat-rical lighting it is often a silhouette only, whichgives a sense of some object casting shadows. Seetheatrical gobo suppliers, such as Rosco, Lee, Apol-lo, and Great American Market (GAM) for examples.It is possible, however, to use colored images as pro-jected textures. This might be useful for simulatingslide/film/video projectors.

To create a texture for projecting it is best to keeptwo things in mind. One is to consider what in ascene would cast shadows, such as trees or windowdetails. The other is to consider the quality (or diffu-sion) of the shadow being cast.

MAKING OF: Using Textured Light to Spice Up a Scene

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Objects that are very far away from the surface that isreceiving a shadow will cast a diffuse shadow, while anobject closer will cast a sharper shadow. Simply blur thetexture in order to get the proper quality of shadow. Tex-tures designed for shadows should have white or thelight color pixels for where light will pass through andblack where there should be shadow.

Assigning textures to spotlights is a matter of selectingthe light, going to its texture properties, assigning a newimage texture and making sure its mapping is set to“View.”

Examples

A straight tree goboimage projectedonto the scene.

A blurred tree goboto achieve theproper shadowquality.

A window goboprojected onto thescene.

Window and tree combined. Figure 4

What if the lighting is great and a textured sourcechanges the intensity too much? Try a projection with anegative energy source, but be sure to invert your imagetexture. Negative projections have the bonus of notneeding to cast shadows. Figure 5

Caveat! Texture can not be applied to halos. Let’s hopethis changes some day…

Window and treecombined. What ifthe lighting is greatand a texturedsource changes theintensity too much?Try a projectionwith a negative en-ergy source, but besure to invert yourimage texture. Nega-tive projections havethe bonus of notneeding to castshadows. Figure 5

Caveat! Texture cannot be applied tohalos. Let’s hopethis changes someday

MAKING OF: Using Textured Light to Spice Up a Scene

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IntroductionIn real life nothing remains untouchedby light, every aspect of the visual me-dium that we savor is due to the pres-ence of light. Light as an element wouldmean nothing if its interference withcolors, texture, shape volume and dis-tance is somehow disconnected from it.The light also plays significant role indrawing the viewer’s emotional attentiontowards the scene.

We humans have incredibly sharp under-standing of light and its effects so much so that theunconscious brain lets us enjoy the beautiful pic-ture or landscape without even thinking about thelight properties that created it. That deep connectedunderstanding is ingrained in to our minds sincethe day we had opened our eyes to the beautifulworld of light. Any little deviation in the regular or-der of light such as placement, direction, intensityand or color instantly alerts our mind to pause andre-think over the scene, for example red light is con-sidered a signal for danger, similarly deep blue forfear or the unknown/mystery and both of them areused in the movies and 3d cg scenes. We in theworld of CG remain mystified and starry eyed aboutthe visual richness of our world, being awed andinspired we turn to the tools at hand in the CGworld to create that exclusive realistic feel.

In this walkthrough we are going to show you stepby step how we created the lighting setup for one ofthe scene of our upcoming sequel to the game Pa-helika. The scene in question is titled “The Vault”.According to the design documentation this scenewas to be shown as an old well built hidden cham-

ber containing various vaults and a backup genera-tor. The room has only one approach and that isthrough the lift.

Step1. The setup

After the model-ling process wascompleted wemoved on tolighting thescene. Now firststep was to findout the lightsource, we had atungsten bulb fit-ted in the roomthat took care of the primary light. An Omni lamp isa natural replacement for the tungsten bulb in reallife. Next shadows were enabled on that lamp andthe scene was checked for aesthetical balance.

Step2. A problem

The first thing we need to deal was that since thebulb is placed on one wall, the wall perpendicularto it is lit more than the wall it is on, which looksodd as human eyes are well trained to catch thisanomaly, so tocorrect this onelamp was addedon a new layeralso the wallwhich is receivingless light ismoved to thesame layer.

MAKING OF: Lighting the Vault

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Lighting the Vault

Now we changed the lamp to account for lighting in itsown layer so as to protect its light interaction withother objects in the scene. Since we do not need anyspecularity in the scene we also went ahead and disa-bled specularity and let only the diffusion affect thewall.

Default intensity was also reduced to offset the bright-ness when both the layers were rendered in combina-tion.

Step3. Fake Global Illumination

We are not using AO in the scene to manage faster ren-dering times.

We decided to add more lamps to compensate for thepossible indirect lighting. So another lamp is added al-most opposite to the main light source. We are going touse this as a filler lamp so we will need to reduce theintensity so as to match a near realistic physical diffu-sion of light.

Step4. Details

Strange as itmay sound to anewbie, mostscenes in 3d arein more thanone way a plaincopy of the ba-sic photo-graphic light principles. Since we already had two lightsource a main light and a fill light, the only one lackingis a highlighter. Now as those of you who had readabout the basic three point lighting will understand thevalue of an highlighter lamp. It brings out the depth byincreasing contrast over the edges of the objects in the

scene making it more appealing to the viewer. So weadded a lamp and disabled diffusion on it and placed itdiagonally opposite to the direction of light and shadow.Now as you can see it brings out decent highlights overthe objects bringing them forward in the scene.

The scene is notfinished and itpending for fi-nal review. But Ihope that ithave shown youhow to proceedin lighting solu-tion for thisscene. Lightingis a very vastarea and one can never learn enough to be expert how-ever to begin learning is the first step indeed. All of youwho are new to the field of CG lighting are encouragedto purchase the book ‘Lighting & rendering’ by JeremyBrim which we have already reviewed in the earlier is-sue of blenderart magazine

MAKING OF: Lighting the Vault

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ARTICLE: Lighting Troubleshooting Tips

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Unless you are a master lighting guru,at some point you are going to runinto lighting problems. Lighting

problems are generally (but not always)one of the following:

really bright areas

really dark areas

strange shadows

lines on your objects

Here is a short check list of suggestions fortroubleshooting what has gone wrong.

Deactivating Materials

Materials obviously interactwith light, and can often be acause of confusion when try-ing to track down lightingproblems. So to isolate if it isa lighting problem or more ofa material problem, try tem-porarily deactivating all mate-rials.

Create a default material, amedium gray one, and enterthe name into the Materialfield, Render Layers panel.Just clear this field to returnto your original materials.

After rendering check to see ifyou have the same lightingproblems with just gray ob-jects. If the problem has dis-appeared, you have a

materials-interacting-with-light problem.

Check the material settings, especially ambient, reflec-tion and all those little buttons and sliders on theShaders panel. Because some lights can be set to affectonly certain materials, be sure to check those if only afew of your object appear to be lit wrong.

Kill off your Lights

Since the problem could be one or more of your lights,it is time to check them all one by one.

Move all your lights to an unused layer and start re-adding them one at a time, checking setting and howit affects the image overall.

As you add them back in, make sure they add in nicely,reduce light energy as needed or even considered elim-inating the last added one if it doesn't seem to be add-ing to your image.

Check Layer only Lights

Lights can be set to affect only certain layers, so ifonly some of your gray objects are appearing odd,then check to see if a lamp is only affecting one ormore layers.

This can be set accidentally, or you may have forgot-ten that you set it earlier in your project. Misc tips

Negative lights can add desired shadows, but they canalso introduce some extra problems. So pay extra at-tention when using them and make sure they are notadding to your problems.

Overly textured lights can make your scene have ran-dom weird colors.


Lighting Troubleshooting

ARTICLE: Lighting Troubleshooting Tips

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Overly colored lights can affectmaterial colors as well as yourlighting in general. Try to staywith a slight tinge of blue or yel-low or shades of white, or yourmaterial may show blue in theMaterial sub-context but rendergreen, it can take ages to trackdown what has happened.

Environment settings can cause awhole host of problems, especiallythe Horizon, Zenith, and Ambientlight settings.

While this list obviously won't coverevery lighting problem, it does giveyou a good starting point to trackdown what has happened.


ARTICLE: Blender Farms: Farming for the future

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By now, I think it's fair to say that Blender 2.5alphahas shown the industry that Blender is a seriouscontender in the 3D world. With features that us-

ers of other applications can only dream of being inte-grated in the base install, features such as; Volumetrics,Water, and Cloth/Soft Bodies, to name but a few.

It is easy, however, to forget that the UI and integratedfeature list aren't the only things that are getting amakeover.

With the scripting interface being revamped, A wholenew world of possibilities are being opened-up. Possi-bilities that with little effort could become realities,even the more remote such as 'bake-farming' and fullyintegrated render-farms can now be realized.

'Bake-farming', in-fact, as an idea, has previously beenlaughed at by some, as an unrealistic dream. But withprojects such as BulletPhysics, and commercial ven-tures such as PhysX, starting to show that simulationscan be done with stream-processors, either via OpenCLor CUDA. What's stopping render-farms from doing thesame?

With render-farming becoming outdated by better,more powerful, hardware and renderers such as Lux-Render working towards OpenCL Support. Render-farmscould soon be forced to change tack and evolve intohybrid bake/render-farms in the near future in an effortto retain profit levels in a closing market.

With more complex simulations taking a number ofhours to complete, having a simple button that submitsthe work to a farm and returns the baked data withinminutes, would be highly beneficial. Especially when,as with many simulations, you may want to tweak thesettings many times before you are truly happy withthe result.

At the time of writing, only two render-farms have con-firmed support for Blender 2.5 and subsequently Blender2.6 on release.

With the “Global-recession” advancing, the power ofAmazon's EC2“Elastic Compute Cloud environment” andthe constant increase in the speed of end-user hard-ware, it could be fair to say that render-farms should belooking to enhance the service they provide, in order toretain, or even increase profit margins. Yet none ofthose contacted prior to the writing of this article admitto working on enhancing the service they provide. Ei-ther by redesigning their upload method into an easy-to-use augmentation of Blender's render UI, Or by in-vesting in the development of 'bake-farming'. Whilesome are making promising progress on their own up-load systems, they are still very much external opera-tions that disrupt the production process in a way thatis no longer necessary.

It appears, that for now, the future of a fully integrated“Blender-Farm” is still a very distant dream.

Thankfully though we can content ourselves, at least fornow, with the multitude of integrated 'internal-external'render engines that are expected as new features inBlender 2.6.

'Bake-farming' is, as the name suggests, a way of bakinga simulation via a render-farm-like system.

The simulation would be submitted to the farm, thatwould then calculate the simulation's outcome, andreturn the baked data in a far shorter time than the in-dividual machine could have done. Much in the sameway that a render-farm works.

The theory that makes 'bake-farming' possible is alreadybeing put to practice in stream computing environ-ments


Blenderfarm

lukVille02.51-6GALLERIA

28www.blenderart.org Issue 27 | Apr 2010 - "Shadow Showdown - Achieving Light/Shadow Balance"

Hobbit Town - Cristian Mihaescu (criss)GALLERIA


HIV - by Scott MeadorGALLERIA


Ferrari Enzo - by Nikola NovakGALLERIA


Living Room - by Victor PhellipeGALLERIA


kangarooLowSpecGALLERIA


Dark blue Foreheads on a red bicycle -by Andreev AlexanderGALLERIA


Merry Christmas- by Chris (organic)GALLERIA


Stairwell - by Chris (organic)GALLERIA


Thirsty Day - by Frank the SmithGALLERIA


The Vault - by Gaurav NawaniGALLERIA


Ancient - by Scott MeadorGALLERIA


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blenderart magazine issue 27 shadow showdown

Documents

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