Hi! I am making an animation where the earth orbits the sun. I want to show how the sun cast sunshine at the earth. I don’t know how to solve the following problem: How to get the sun casting sunshine at the same time as the sun surface is not completely white out. I just want to have a texture at the sun while it cast lights at the earth. Does anyone have a tip or two?
Here I have created one sun that emits lights and another one with texture. How do I create a sun with texture casting light at the earth?
For Cycles, you can use a light path node to differentiate between camera rays (sun is visible to camera) and reflection/shadow rays (sun is visible only in rays reflected by the earth or other objects.) You can use two different materials and mix them on the basis of camera ray to do what you want.
The “planet” is getting lighted by the sun’s emission shader (ray bounces from camera to planet to sun) but the sun just looks like a diffuse shader, lighted by reflection from the planet (ray bounces from camera to sun to planet to sun.)
