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

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 main 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 ...