Lighting question

[Pamela Galli]

Despite having watched quite a few tutorials on lighting, it remains for me quite a mystery. Sometimes no matter how much light I put on something, it remains dark, and vice versa.

Today I tried to bake a simple column, and no matter what I did, or where I put the column, the bake looked like this:

 

I finally dragged the column (on the R below)  waaaaaaaaay far from my house and the lights (on the left) and there was no effect at all. It is the same material I used on walls.

 

I have reopened the file and restarted Blender, no change. Does anyone have any idea off the top of his head why this one mesh is baking like this?

 

[Masami Kuramoto]

If the light is of type "sun" or "hemi" (= sky), then its distance to an object has no effect on the object's brightness. Sun and sky are always considered to be at "infinite" distance.

A single sun in the scene will result in very hard contrasts between lit and unlit sides. Hemi lights, on the other hand, cause soft transitions. If you want to bake global illumination (i.e. fairly realistic light coming from all sides), you have to use a combination of multiple lights, soft shadows, ambient occlusion and possibly indirect lighting. This is tricky to set up indeed and takes some practice to get right. It would be easier with Blender's new renderer "Cycles", but unfortunately Cycles cannot (yet?) be used for baking.