Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Setting Up the World

When you set up your scene for rendering, lighting is really only part of the equation. You must also consider your scene's environment. For example, are you outdoors or indoors? Is it daytime or nighttime? What color is the sky? Are there clouds? What does the background look like? You have to consider these factors when thinking about the final look of your image. Fortunately, nearly all the controls for setting up your environment are in World Properties, as shown in Figure 9-12.

Changing the sky to something other than dull gray

If you've worked in Blender for a while and gotten a few renders out, you might be pretty tired of that dull gray background color that the renderer uses by default. Here's where you change that color: Look in the World panel of World Properties. The leftmost color swatch sets the horizon color. You can adjust it by left-clicking the color swatch and using the color picker.

To the right of the horizon color is the zenith color. You may notice that trying to change this color doesn't seem to affect the background color at all. By default, Blender is set to use only the horizon color, so you end up with a solid color as the background. To change this default, left-click the Blend Sky check box in the World panel. When you do, the Preview shows a linear gradient that transitions from the horizon color at the bottom to the zenith color at the top. If I'm doing a render where I just want to see a model I've created, I often use this ...