How to create a shining light effect

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on November 10, 2011 at 7:59am

One way to do this is to create a texture pattern resembling the shining effect and place it on a surface in SketchUp. Here I created a sample pattern by grabbing the image from your sample. I could also have used an alpha channel PNG image to make the black parts of the texture transparent to achieve a similar lighting effect.

I used a contrast filter to intensify the part of the image which was lit.

I placed three separate insurance of the pattern. On the left one I used material self glow to brighten it. Self glow make it shine, but does not treat it as a light.  For the center one, I left it just a a material, but not as a light. One the right hand one, I used Object Properties to make the curface and material a light. Note how the "light" appears much more where the texture is light and much less where the material is dark.

I then used lighting channels to adjust the intensity of the glow and object property lights to get the effect desired.

A  part of the SketchUp model is on the left. The rendered image is on the right.

This would have worked better if the original texture used alpha channel transparency, rather than a black background.

Here is an example using after increasing the intensity of the left hand light.

(Lighting channels are more fun if you get to watch the image change as you adjust the channel intensities)

 

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on November 10, 2011 at 8:39am

Probably a better way to get the glare effect is with Post Porcessing.

Photo Shop has a decent set of lens flare type filters-- Gimp does as well.  The nXtImage Image Editor has a basic glare filter which may work for the fuzzy part of the glare.

It will be easier to add these as a post process after rendering, than to try to include the flare in the rendering process.

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