Achieve Photorealistic Lighting in Your Environment with Blender

Lighting can make or break any 3D project. In this chapter, we will explore the basics of lighting in Blender. We will look at three different ways to apply realistic lighting to our wood cabin scene, the different properties those three lighting methods offer, and how we can configure them.

The objective of this chapter is to achieve realistic lighting in our wood cabin scene that matches the color, direction, and intensity seen in the wood cabin reference image we’re using.

First, we will break down the three Blender rendering engines to understand the difference between them and the role each one plays in achieving photorealism.

Then, we will learn how to use the sun to emit realistic lighting based on the Kelvin temperature scale, add a background to our scene, and then render it. We will also make use of the Blender Sky Texture node to light our environment, and finally we’ll show how to achieve...