Well, i’m sure this is a very basic question, but I’m new to the whole blender thing. So I hope this question isn’t too stupid.
I’m trying to make a model of the solar system, and want to have my main light source as the sun… I read through the manual - albiet I don’t understand it 100% yet - and found something on using the flare option. There’s even a really cool pic of the earth with what looks like a flare from the sun at the earth’s horizon. But when i try to set flare to a sphere I’ve placed in the same location as my lamp head, it seems to put a flare on all vertices. Is there a better way to make light sources in Blender?
Hi and welcome to the community. In blender, flare is always applied to every single vertex. There are basically two ways to get a ‘glowing sun’,
delete all vertices except for one and set the halo/flare size to a really large number. This method renders fast and looks ok from a distance.
or
subdivide the sun even further (thus adding vertices to it) and apply halo/flare as usual to the sun. Play around with the size and alpha(transparency) setting.
One thing to note is that flare/halo isn’t a real light, they glow but don’t cast lights into the surroundings, if you want the sun to light up the planets around it, you’ll need a real ‘lamp’ object.
Hey, thanks for the advice… I’m trying the second option now, but for some reason, no matter how i scale the sphere i made, I end up with a huge white ball, and not a whole lot of glow. But I’m playing with it so hopefully I’ll figure it out.