The document discusses 3D animation settings in Blender for faking a horizon. It describes the World settings panel which allows modification of environmental values like the sky, ambient occlusion, lighting, and mist. It explains the different types of skies including paper sky, blend sky, and real sky and how they are rendered based on camera orientation. It also covers ambient occlusion, gather settings, environmental lighting, indirect lighting, and adding mist and stars to a scene.

1. FAKING A HORIZON
3D Animation with Blender

2. The World settings
 The area allows the
modification of global
environmental values such as;
 World (it’s the sky)
 Ambient Occlusion
 Environmental Lighting
 Indirect lighting
 Gather
 Mist
 Stars

3. World
 Horizon Color is the colour at the Horizon.
 Zenith Color is the colour at te top.
 Types of Sky
 Paper Sky
 If this option is added, the gradient keeps its
characteristics, but it is clipped in the image (it
stays on a horizontal plane (parallel to x-y plane):
what ever the angle of the camera may be, the
horizon is always at the middle of the image).
 Blend SkyThe background color is blended from
horizon to zenith. If only this button is pressed, the
gradient runs from the bottom to the top of the
rendered image regardless of the camera
orientation.
 Real Sky If this option is added, the gradient
produced has two transitions, from nadir (same
color as zenith) to horizon to zenith; the blending
is also dependent on the camera orientation,
which makes it more realistic.The horizon color is
exactly at the horizon (on the x-y plane), and the
zenith color is used for points vertically above and
below the camera.

4. Ambient Occlusion
 Ambient Occlusion is a sophisticated ray-tracing
calculation which simulates soft global illumination
shadows by faking darkness perceived in corners and
at mesh intersections, creases, and cracks, where
ambient light is occluded, or blocked.
 http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Ma
nual/Lighting/Ambient_Occlusion

5. Gather
 The Gather panel contains settings for the
ambient occlusion quality. Note that these
settings also apply to Environment Lighting
and Indirect Lighting.
 Ambient occlusion has two main methods of
calculation: Raytrace and Approximate.
 Ray tracing, ambient occlusion, and indirect
lighting are computer-intensive processes.

6. Environmental & Indirect
Lighting
 Environmental Lighting is the ambient
lighting of the environment
 The use of Indirect lighting is where the
colour of one object radiates onto another.

7. Mist & Stars
 Mist
 Add a mist to your scene to enhance the feeling of
depth.
 http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/World/Mist
 Stars
 Randomly covers the background with halo-like
dots.
 http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/World/Stars