Importance of lighting

Lights are crucial.

The lighting of a scene can change its mood dramatically. Bad lighting will ruin an otherwise completely good render. Good lighting can make even the simplest render look better (that’s what we’ll be doing!).

Lights are simple objects in Blender. You can add them, position them, adjust their brightness, and even change their color.

Lighting defines the mood of a scene. Lighting is what makes a scene feel warm like sunset, bright like midday, or dark like an evil fortress.

Your scene, right now, has no lights (unless you still have the default light in your scene).

Next, let’s switch our render engine to Cycles:

1. Open up your scene and go to the Render Settings tab in the Properties panel.
2. At the very top, you’ll see the Render Engine setting.
3. Switch it to Cycles so that we’re using the Cycles render engine:

Figure 14.2 – Render settings

...