Manual:Our First Scene

Preparing the scene
Before we are going to create our first scene, we will adjust the camera and light. Start Bishop3D and you get a new scene, the way it is defined in new_scene_template.bsp. Generally it has already a light source and a camera, which you can see at the right side in the Scene tree. First lets get the light source at a raised position. To do that, choose Translation manipulator and move up in direction of y (which is represented by the green arrow) or select Transform tab in Object Dialogs right below the Scene tree and type 20 for Translate.y.



There is more than one way to change the render camera to get a nice render perspective. Either you change settings in Transform and Camera tab in Objects Dialog or you use the controls of camera tool bar. In this case we are going to use the second option with shortcuts. Go into Perspective view port and press B to get the camera orbit, rotate to get the horizon at the upper third of the image, then press P to pan and drag it down, so the horizon is in the middle part.

Creating the models
In the Modeler's main menu choose create and sphere. In the Scene tree you can find the newly created sphere.

Select it and press, which opens a dialog to rename it. This step isn't necessary, but it's recommended to give your object unique names, so you can find them via search in a crowded scene.



Lets name it Reflective_Sphere. If you are going to render this scene via, you will just see a black screen, because this sphere has no texture, there is nothing, which can reflect the light. As you have probably seen, there are more tabs in the Objects Dialog. So take a look at it. With the selected sphere there are


 * Model Color, Layer and Flags
 * Transform
 * Sphere
 * Texture
 * Texture Axis
 * Modifier

Model Color, Layer and Flags has an option to change the Model color, this won't affect the render. It's just used in the Modeler and very useful, to mark e.g. an object of special interest in a scene. Try to give it another color. Semitransparent is a great option. Using it, you can look through objects and work with other objects without hiding the first ones. You can also define a Layer to be not visible in the Modeler but in the rendered image and assign objects, you do not have to work on with this Layer or you just deselect the flag Visible In Editor.

Transform provides control of an objects shape, like scaling, rotating and tranlation.

Sphere itself can be used to define a size with Radius.

Texture lets you choose the objects texture or material and Texture Axis controls the texture's size, rotation, translation.

Modifiers tab provides additional options like


 * No Image - the objects shouldn't be visible, but the scene reacts with it (e.g. there are shadows, etc.)
 * No Shadow - the object will not cast shadows.

So lets go and choose the predefined Gold_Texture.



Press to get a render. You might see a golden sphere with a black background like in the following image.



That's our reflective sphere, but there is nothing to reflect, so we can't see much. Lets go to add a checkered floor.

In the Modeler's main menu choose create and plane. In the Scene tree select the newly created plane and rename it by pressing. This time we are going to create our own texture. So press to open the Material editor.



You can create multiple types of Textures and Materials. In the Material editor you can also create separate finishes, interiors, pigments, etc. We will create a new texture. Start by right click at Textures and choose new non-patterned texture. Press and dub it Floor_texture. Right click and choose plain texture. Right click Plain_Texture_Body and choose pigment. Right click Pigment and choose color list pigment. Now you should get following dialog.



Keep Checker and change the colors to color 0 = white, color 2 = black and color 1 = dark blue (when you click at the Entry Color, a dialog opens, where you can define custom colors). To get a preview of the new texture, choose Floor_texture and press. Because we like to create a texture for a plane, it would be useful to choose Plane in the Preview Scene in the Preview panel. Now it's time to add the texture to our Floor. Close the Material editor and go to the Scene tree, choose Floor and Texture tab in Object Dialogs. The new texture can be found in the list. Assign it and render the scene with.

Your image will look similar to this one (in the following image the perspective is changed, you can bring the camera closer to your object by using Camera Dolly of the camera tool bar or just use your mouse wheel in the Perspective view port or translating the camera itself).



Change Render Settings
The rendered image shows some aliasing and it's quite small. So lets change that in the render settings. You can do that two different ways. Either you change your default render settings, which has an effect on all your scenes (also future ones) as long as you don't create a render settings property in the Scene tree. Or you create a render settings property, which affects this scene only. For the first way you go to the main menu, choose Settings and Render. This brings up the dialog for default render options, which looks the same like render settings dialog from Scene tree. To get render settings just for the current scene, you go to the Scene tree and right click Scene, then choose Properties and choose render settings. This will create a symbol right of Scene. Double click that symbol and the render settings dialog window opens.



To get a smoother looking render enable Anti Aliasing.

Now we get a smooth render, but the reflected top of the sphere looks quite dark. So lets add one last thing to our scene: A sky.

Add a Sky Sphere
To add the Sky Sphere, right click at Scene in the Scene tree and choose sky sphere. This will add the Sky Sphere to the scene. If you would render, POV-Ray will prompt an error, as the Sky Sphere doesn't have a Pigment yet. You cannot simple add textures to the Sky Sphere. You will have to create a Pigment. So open the Material editor with and right click at Pigments and add new pigment. Lets make a simple one. Right click Pigment and add blend map pigment. In the Blend Map Pigment Body choose Wrinkles.



Then right click Blend_Map_Pigment_Body in the Material tree and choose color_map. Adjust the colors the way you like. You can't get a preview render of Pigments, but if you like to see, how the pigments look like, you can create a texture and add that pigment by copy and paste to the Plain_Texture_Body, then render a preview of the texture. The following image shows an extreme example of the Blend_Map_Pigment_Body.



With this Pigment created, close the Material editor and go back to the Modeler, choose the Sky Sphere and select Pigment tab in the Object Dialogs. There choose the created Pigment from Selected Pigments list and click insert. When the Pigment is listed in Pigments-box, it's added to the Sky Sphere. You can create and add multiple pigments to the Sky Sphere.



Now render the scene with. Your Reflective Sphere on checkered plane is finished.



Download
You can download the Bishop3D file referent to this tutorial [[media:Reflective_Sphere.zip|here]] (2 KB).