I want my sphere’s to give light and have definition. I’ve tried some combinations of nodes that seemed logical in my mind but nothing works. Is this just not a possible effect to achieve?
You’re applying the emission wrong, the emission shader can be mixed in with all of the other types and plugged into the ‘surface’ output.
The only thing to note here is that the emission shader can be used to have the objects produce color values well above one, so the mix effect might be completely drowned out if the power is high enough.
Thanks for the advice dragon. No luck with this set up either.
Time to hit tutorial land on cycles materials and the node editor. I just don’t have enough practical knowledge of the tools yet to get what I want. 
I solved the problem. Let’s do an analysis of how came to my result.
- Setting up the scene:I tied three UV Spheres spaced at one unit, with three different materials (in this case RED, GREEN and BLUE) together. I added a 10 by 10 plane and made a 500 count particle system and tweaked some of the many values to get a result that looked good. I made one of the states of the animation ‘real’ (shift+ctrl+a). This left me with a pseudo random field of RGB UV spheres.
- Mixing the shaders:
My first logical step was to mix the ‘Diffuse’ and ‘Emission’ shaders to allow light bounces and emission calculations combined on one or more objects. It didn’t work. Ace Dragon said the key words in part of his first sentance “You’re applying the emission wrong,”
I fumbled with a few more node configurations with no result.
- Research:
I did some research, below I will show my search strings and information I found regarding this shader mix.
This mix is simple in theory, two shaders. The third being the LightPath node. This node has lots of output options and needs a lot of exploring done by me to fully understand its usage. In this case however the ‘Is Camera’ output was the one which blended these two shaders. Scientifically I have no idea why. It seems that ‘Is Camera’ should mean ‘Is Renderer’? Regardless it worked.
Render Result:This basic scene took almost nine and a half minutes to render because of all the different light bounces involved.
Conclusion:After seeing the mix work I saw drawbacks. The spheres don’t inherit much glow. I was looking for them to glow and project light while being distinguishable as spheres. My question now is, can compositing bring this effect?
Will similar color values render faster? What are deeper usages of the ‘Light Path’ Node?
Happy Blending. :eyebrowlift2:
Wow you like to post very thoroughly. Right down to the Google search. Kewl.
You’re forgetting - or not considering - the fact that the diffuse part of the material needs a light reflecting off it to be seen.You don’t appear to have any in your scene. The is camera ray test means - and I don’t know if you already know this, so bear with me - that if the camera sees the object ONLY the second shader input will be used. For all instances of other things that are ‘seeing’ the object, as in a light path bouncing off it and reaching said object, it’s not a camera ray so the top shader will be used. So the plane is only being lit by the emissions of light. The camera is only seeing the diffuse material of the spheres. This is why the upper spheres are so dark - they are not lit by anything so the camera is not getting any diffuse bounce from them. The lower spheres are lit by the upper spheres, and also catching their own emission bounced from the plane, and the camera can see that.
For starters you can crank that emission value up; since the camera can’t see it it’ll just pump more light into the scene. After thatI would turn on the world at a low setting and make that invisible to the camera (in the world panel bottom) so your background stays black. This will light the top sides of the spheres. Then it’s just balancing the two light sources to bs effect.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]284739[/ATTACH]
Are you trying to do this? Whenever you want something to have more definition you have to think about either the Fresnel node or the Layer weight node. This changes the way that the mix node works by basically taking into account the angle of the camera.
You can further add definition to glowing spheres by adding the Fac value of a texture to the strength input of the emission node. Try a Voronal texture for example, set it to cells and plug it’s fac value into the strength value of the emission node and set the scale to something like 90 and see what happens. It will look kind of like a plastic ball with a lightbulb inside of it.
DruBan - Thanks for the insight, great read. I learned 
I decided to post my search results to show that I made some effort on trying to solve on my own. Even though my solve was only partial… I didn’t just mash buttons and come screaming for help in the forums. At least now we have an experiment set up with COMMUNITY members working together.
Empire Arts - You nailed what I was envisioning when I closed my eyes and thought of the scene. I’m going to try using Vorn to control strength of emission. I can’t get into it right now, work early. Tonight I should have some renders.
Again - thanks to both of you.
-Nick
I decided to post my search results to show that I made some effort on trying to solve on my own.
I got that. No worries!
I think the add shader is actually what you were looking for originally:
Mix replaces one shader with another. Add combines the results of both, and in the case of emission, that’s what you want. An object doesn’t stop being a normal, matte object just because it’s shining. Instead, it both reflects AND shines, and that is what the add shader gets you.
J_the_ninja, no luck with your set up. I even tweaked emission values high and low and compared.
Here’s a render of the “Layer weight” set up:
That looks pretty cool. Glad I could help 
Moony - Yes. Looks cool. I’m using these kinds of materials for a light bulb and led piping in electronics. I’m seeing now that there is many ways to get the general effect.
I used a slightly rough glossy node rather than a diffuse node to get that effect.