Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Turning on the Lights

You already have materials set up, so now it’s time to make the scene look more realistic with some light and shadows. Lights are compatible with Blender Render and Cycles, but given the different nature of both render engines, the lights have different effects, so if you switch from one render engine to another, you may need to adjust their parameters. Also, one of the benefits of Cycles is that because it is a realistic render engine, it allows you to use emissive materials, which can turn any mesh into a light emitter to illuminate the scene. This can simulate cool and very realistic effects that cannot be achieved with normal lights. In this first scene, we’re only going to use a couple of point lights (Chapter 14