Enhance Your Blender Renders with Textured Lighting

Here's a text-based tutorial that I created to help you spice up your scenes with textured lighting. We’ll take a look at how simple it is to drastically effect the look and feel of your renders by applying textures to lighting. Applying a texture to a light is generally the same as applying a texture to an object. The only difference is that we’ll be projecting the texture into the scene based on the light settings.

Although not a lighting tutorial that goes into great details of the lighting setups, we will take a look at the basic function of the lights within the different scenes. We’ll also cover how to create your own simple textures for the lighting. The last example will show how simple it is to use a video as a light texture.

These techniques will allow you to create interesting light and shadow patterns that can help frame the "story" and context of your scene; thus helping you to create scenes that no longer appear to exist within the all too common CG vacuum. They will also allow you to add subtle variations to your lighting instead of the ultra-clean lighting often seen when using very basic lighting techniques.

This tutorial requires a knowledge of the basics of applying a texture to an object in Blender.

You can view the tutorial at BlenderCookie.com.

technorati tags: Blender3D, 3D, graphics, Blender tutorials

Disabling Modifiers to Increase Interface Responsiveness

As you develop your 3d models and scenes, you inevitably come to a point where the responsiveness of the 3D View begins to diminish. There are many ways to deal with this issue, but one way that may not be too obvious is to simply temporarily disable the effects of some modifiers in the 3D View.

This works really well for modifiers that add geometry or objects to the scene, such as:

• Subsurf
• Particles
• Mirror
• Array

For example, you add a Level 2 Subsurf to a model in a scene and begin working on some other aspect of the scene. You can temporarily disable the Surbsurf effects for any existing models while still having the Subsurf applied during the render. This lightens the load for the 3D View and increases the interface's responsiveness as you continue to work on other aspects of your scene. Using this strategy in a scene containing several objects with multiple modifier's applied can result in a significant increase in performance.

To disable a modifier's effects in the 3D View, simply deselect the button indicated below. This same button can be found on the control panel of all modifiers and is enabled by default.


Also, note that you can disable a modifier's effects during a render and in the editing mode by toggling the appropriate button.

technorati tags: Blender3D, 3D, graphics, Blender tutorials

Enabling Texture Visibility on Both Sides of a Face

By default, Blender will display uv-mapped textures on only one side of a face. To get them to be visible on both sides, do the following:

Here we have a Plane object with an image texture mapped onto it.


Here is the back side of the Plane with no texture visible.


To make the texture visible on the back side, Tab into Edit mode and select the face. Then, go to the Editing buttons window (F9) and locate the Texture Face panel as shown. Enable the Twoside option, and that's it!


You now have the texture displaying on both sides.

technorati tags: Blender3D, 3D, graphics, Blender tutorials