Working with lighting and environment

- [Instructor] So I'm here in my chapter 2-4 project in my projects event in my chapter two folder, and we've been working on some 3D text or some basic 3D text in the last few movies. We've chosen a material, we've repositioned it in 3D space, and now it's time to actually add some lighting to this text. So I want to show you that all 3D text, if we look in the inspector, or the text inspector, scroll down after the basic format properties, and into the 3D text properties, you'll see there's a section for lighting.

If I show these properties, we get to choose from a various amount of lighting styles. Now this is going to change quite a bit depending on the type of material you have wrapped around your text. So let me just change this from standard to above. And you might see a subtle change that happens across the face of our text. So we can choose from a variety of presets, even something such as back-lit, and you'll see here that now this text looks a lot differently. On top of a lighting style, I can play around with the intensity parameter.

As much as this is set to 100%, it goes further, like similar parameters that we've seen that do the same thing under substance, and we can make this a lot brighter. And we can start to integrate this 3D text into a scene depending on if it calls for it. So the intensity of 341% is way too much in this particular case, but I think something slightly above the 100% that was the default might work. Something like 130, you can see how that affects the side and back of my text different than the front face.

So besides the lighting styles, there's also an environment that might shine or reflect on your text depending on the type of material that you have. So I'm going to show you right now that the type of environment that's been chosen happens to be a field. I can change this to another type of environment just to show this a bit better, I'm going to choose colorful. It's like being within a studio. And it really has a profound impact on our text.

Now this type isn't very suitable for my cave-type atmosphere, so I'm going to choose something else. In fact, not many of these materials, maybe woods might work out there in the material. Not even that works across the text, so I want to go back to the default field, and just note that, you know, this type of environment, we don't need it to shine too much across our text. In fact, we'd rather deal with the environment that it's currently in. Now keep in mind that we can rotate the environment that's appearing across our text, or being reflected on of our text.

We can play around with the saturation, and by mixing in lights and environments depending on how we're trying to integrate our text into the scene, we can create much more believable text by simply playing with both lights as well as environments.