Making a sun.

Support Compositing and Post Processing
#1

Hey all,

I’m trying to mimic the effect of a morning sunrise, visible through a window. The problem is, I’ve never made a sun before!
My setup is like this: I made a cube and deleted one side. This is the side I use to look in with the camera. On the opposite side a subdivided/deleted faces to make a window (basically a hole in the other side of the cube, for now.). I have a halo spotlight outside that wall, but I can sitll see the halo coming through the mesh.
No matter what I do, a little bit of light will go through the mesh, even with halo stepping on 12.
Also, a halo spotlight only looks like a sun when it is directly facing the camera. Any other time and it’s just a very bright… point.
What is the best approach to making a nice sun?

Thanks a lot for all of your help. I haven’t given much to this community, but, one day I will!

#2

You can select the light, then select the camera, then press Ctrl+T to make the light track the camera.

#3

Hey, thanks for the tip, it helped.
Now just one last thing and I might be able to pull this off. Is there any way of preventing a spot light’s halo light from going through mesh?

#4

Hmm i did make a sun…However the results …i think wasn’t convincing enough

http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb254/Superflanker_EVA/sky.png

any tips ?

#5

I think your picture would work if the sun was set to track to the camera.

#6

When I have the sun in a shot, I tend to use a shadeless yellow-white disc as the visible source, and use either a halo lens flare or post-processing bloom (or both) on top of that. It’s also a great platform for sticking the lamp onto. The lens flare will automatically adjust based on camera movement or occluding objects.

I don’t have any experience with having an occluded spotlight halo in my scenes, though, but it seems to me that it was implemented before the render pipeline recode (for Elephants Dream) and might be a bit buggy.