Tutorial: Realtime GLSL Lighting and Shading

Kfir Merlaub (who has been producing some amazing sculpting art) has joined CG Cookie. He presents his first tutorial in which he explains how to achieve his amazing GLSL lighting setup.

In this tutorial I will go through some of Blender’s basic features for real time rendering when presenting any kind of model or digital sculpture.
Examining a digital sculpture I recently created called – Death Taker. I introduce my personal technique for setting up the presentation. I explain in depth each part of the lighting and shading process for reaching these results demonstrating all the aspects in recreating a simple example scene.
Overview:

• Realtime shadows setup with the Blender Game Settings
• Using Hemi lights for faking ambient / bounce light effects
• Using the 3 lights method – Key light, Fill light, Rim light
• Ramp shader material creation with Warldso Specularity
• Baking the Ambient Occlusion and Dirty Vertex Paint (cavity) into the Mesh vertex color data
• Using the material nodes to multiply the bakes on top of the material (introducing the nodes – Geometry, ColorRamp, Mix RGB)
• Discussing the specific choices I made for lighting and shading the sculpt – Death Taker