Which concepts should be used to render road lighting from a vehicle point of view using Blender?

Question

I have never used Blender except for quick trials when I installed in Linux, but I wonder if I can used to solve a very specific problem.

I want to render some images showing a vehicle projecting light in a road with some objects (people, posts, signs). I need a bird's eye (superior, orthogonal) view, and the view from inside the vehicle (perspective, first-person) that is the image that would be seen by the driver or rider.

My question is: "Which CONCEPTS should I look for when searching Blender tutorials, in order to:

• Select and use the proper rendering algorithm;
• Modeling a scene with surfaces, materials, light sources and cameras;
• Adding photorealistic behavior regarding light diffusion, reflection, etc.

Sorry if that is too obvious or too basic, but I am not even sure if Blender is able to model such a thing with an acceptable degree of photorealism (not super-realistic, that is not my intention).

Also, if there is another more appropriate StackExchange site to post this quesion, please let me know.

A nice First-Person viewport would be similar to this (without contour lines):

And a nice bird's eye viewport (witout color-mapping) would be this:

Answer 1

Cycles is blender's newer render engine that is fully raytraced and can easily create realistic results. On the other hand the older blender internal renderer can give you more control over lights, like length and angle from source but also the ability to subtract light from areas, it also supports volumetric rendering (if you want a foggy lit area) which is being worked on for cycles. This may be a key to the results you want. As you want to have control over the area that is lit I would run a couple of tests with lights over a plane to see whether cycles or blender internal can easily give the results your after.

As for the final render you can set the camera to perspective with control over focal length or orthographic and adjust scale as well as the option of a panoramic camera to get the final image you want.

Blender includes a ruler and protractor feature, there are also a couple of addons that may help. The scene settings offer metric or imperial display of measurements within blender.

For concepts, it sounds like your final scene would be fairly simple and any basic modelling and texturing would help. Blendswap could be a good resource for free models to help get you started.

For tutorials Blender Cookie is a great site for tutorials on specific tasks and has a good introduction to blender tutorial, while Blenderguru tutorials focus more on the final image.

Blender has also had it's own stackexchange site blender.stackexchange.com for a few months now.