When modeling, is there a way to have light shine from behind viewport camera?

Question

I'm modeling a simple environment and trying to get some sense of what it looks like with textures early on. Whenever I switch the viewport to either texture or material mode, though, only the meshes that are lit by lights are visible. This is slowing down my workflow because I have to keep stopping to add more lights to the scene to see what's happening. All the lights are also cluttering things up and have to be repositioned every time I move meshes around.

(I've also found the Multitexture/Shadless option in the 'n' menu, but that turns off all lighting information.)

Maya has a nice feature where you can switch from viewing the scene with the placed lights to having the scene lit from a single point light positioned behind the viewport camera. This lets you get a good sense of what things look like with textures and shading without having to place lights through your entire scene. Does Blender have a similar feature?

Answer 1

You can put the scene lights on a separate layer, turn them of during viewport editing, and then parent a new lamp to the back of the camera. You can turn off the restrict rendering setting for the test lamp in the outliner.

This works in Blender Internal, but not in Cycles. You could test texture placment in BI, and then render from Cycles. It's possible to create shaders that work cross-engine, you just have to add the specific outputs. The BSDF nodes wouldn't work in BI, but the textures would.

Answer 2

First of all, are you using Cycles or Blender Internal?

I'm not sure what you mean with this: "only the meshes that are lit by lights are visible". It sound like you don't want dark shadows, but you don't want materials to appear shadeless either.

Without seeing a screen shot of what this Maya feature looks like it's hard to know what advice to give, but I'll offer this: Try parenting a Sun Lamp to your camera, shining in the direction your camera looks. You can then go to the Outliner window and disable this lamp for rendering (it will still show for viewport rendering).

Viewport rendering can be toggled using [Shift Z]. You'll need to be looking through Camera View, so press 0. Enable "Lock Camera to View" in the Properties Panel, so that the camera follows your viewport.

Note that since lamps don't have any surface you won't see glossy reflections from them. You could use a mesh lamp instead (Cycles only), but that's another topic.

Also note that this method causes your camera to be used as a previewing tool, rather than a camera, so you may want to correct for that by adding a Copy Transforms constraint to your camera, targeted to an Empty that points as you want, and enable it only when you render.