How to Make Ordinary Objects Give Off Light

[ODdOnLifeItself]

In Blender, it's very easy to make objects give off their own light. Picture the little glowing footlights along a corridor in a spaceship. They not only need to look like lights, but being lights, they also need to cast that light onto close objects in order to really simulate the effect.

There are mainly two things that are necessary to make objects give off light. The first is that the light-producing object's illuminating faces must have an Emit value (in Materials) greater than 0. The values go from 0 to 2. The second thing that is necessary is that Indirect Lighting has to be turned on in the Scene tab. (In order to use Indirect Lighting, you have to change the Gather method from Raytraced to Approximate.) Once this is done, then any objects' faces with an Emit value will give off some light. Enough of it and it will show on the other close objects in the scene.

Below is an example of what I mean. Notice how the alternating Blue/Red rectangles cause a colorcast to the ground surface. On the right object inside the torus, it has no coloring (white) and so it's surface picks up the colors of the close lights. You can see that it is at once, both blue in part and red in part, but remains white on the parts where the lit faces can't reach. At extreme values, the objects can actually give off a lot of light. (sphere with white bands)

Some dramatic results are possible with this technique! The image below is to show how it works and to perhaps give some ideas of how you'd like to use illuminating faces in your works.



Peace

James