For this tutorial a working knowledge of Blender is expected.
This tutorial starts where the BASIC TERRAIN TUTORIAL ends.

DOING THINGS WITH THE SHADOW

So after strugling through the first tutorial we finally got something like this:

Here I positioned the red ball close to the surface of the terrain. In this way we get an enormous shadow. What we are going to try now is to reduce the size of shadow. This is easily done with layers...

LAYERS Blender layers are an efficient way to organize your work and controle visibility. Objects on a selected layer are visible. Select a layer by pushing the corresponding button. It is possible to select more than one layer: shift and click on the layers you want to select. Blender has for the moment 20 layers available.

1. Select the red ball by clicking on it with the right mouse button. The black mesh turns to pink.
   Now it is time to duplicate the ball. This is done by pushing shift D .
   The mesh turns white. This means that the mesh is duplicated and selected to be moved. Since we don't want the mesh to be moved push Esc .

   
   
   
   

2. Now we are going to move the copy of the mesh to another layer. Push M . A new menu appears. Select the second layer on the new menu and push OK . The mesh is moved to the second layer.

   

   If you want to see the moved mesh, push the second layer button of 3D window.

   

3. Go back to the first layer in the 3D window. Select the original mesh of the ball with the right button. Scale the ball down by pushing on the S (mesh turns white) and moving the mouse towards the center of your mesh (small pink ball). Once you find that the mesh has the right size click on the left mouse button.

   

   Why are we doing this?
   Normally all lamps throw light on all objects in all the visible layers. By default Ter2Blend creates one spotlight and one hemi light in the first layer. In the light menu you see that the layer button of the spotlight is activated (if you want to see this, you first have to select the spotlight in the 3D window with the right mouse button).
   This means that only objects in the same layer receive light. So only the smaller ball will receive light and will throw a shadow on the the terrain mesh.

   

4. Select the first and the second layer in the 3D window. We select the two layers because we want to render both. This is done by pushing shift and clicking with the left mouse button on the appropriate layer button.
   When both layers are selected, push that RENDER button.

   

   When all is well you will see something like this.

   

   What a difference!! Layers really expands the possibilities of Blender, use them!
   
   
   Happy Blendering,
   
   Guy