Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2010/07/25/a-big-blue-light-in-blender-2-5-quick-and-dirty/

Looks more powerful with a... light!

Hello from Starbright Illustrations. Visit my 3D sci-fi spaceship game site here.

I wanted a big blue light for the side of my spaceship model, to make it look high tech. I had already added a bunch of other greebles, boxes, panels etc, but a nice square illuminated panel would make an interesting change to the usual greebling I thought.

But the question was, how to do it?

I knew the look I was going for, a sort of backlit plastic panel sticking out of a dark are in a recess on the side of the spaceship, but I had no idea how to go about it. Instead of my usual plan, just Google up an answer, I decided to do some experimenting for myself.

First I used a transparent blue material for the panel and put a bright light behind it. The results were less than optimal, with the light flooding out over the rest of the model, and not looking particularly blue either.

That's not right, it looks like spaceship damage.

I tried altering the settings on the light, and altering its position but always ended up with a dim panel not much different to the other ones on the spaceship, or something that looked like an explosion.

It was then that I had my great idea. In real life the source of the illumination for raytracing has to be inside the model, but Blender isn’t real life. What if I place my source outside and point it down at a panel with the hardness turned right down.

I’m very proud of my solution, and it only took me a couple of hours to come up with it. Of course if I had gone straight to google the solution would probably have been findable within minutes – but I wouldn’t have learned as much.

Read more about this spaceship model here.