What’s the best way to do a hard rim light (/kicker/edge light/hair light) in Cycles? I haven’t had any luck with various sizes and shapes of mesh lights with emission. If I make a very small mesh light in Cycles it reads only if there are no other emission surfaces lighting the scene. Is there a good way to do this without using the compositor?
Here’s an example done with a Spot light in BI. The rim light is green for illustration.
Not sure if your using any reflections but if you add a Fresnel to the material and a color ramp to control the spread. Maybe
you can attach a Fresnel to a light path node?!
You can use a spotlight in cycles also. mesh lights aren’t directed enough to get a good rim light… you might need a more recent version of blender, not sure when they added spotlights back to cycles… here’s what it looks like for me in blender 2.68
Also the size and distance of ur light will determine the rim affect. Large sized lights will give you soft rim & soft shadows, but
a small size light will give stronger rim highlights & shadows. The sun is a small source light and because of that you’ll get strong
highlights on objects.
Thanks for the replies. I was able to get the spot light working for a rim light by adding the emission node to the spot and increasing the strength to 1000 (to read on the subject lit by a plane with emission strength 1.0). When I tried it before I didn’t add the node and didn’t know I needed such a high strength value. Thanks for the helpful screenshots.
