I want to place a texture with some parts alpha and some parts solid and put a light behind and have the light shine through the texture (and textured lights will not do the effect I am after) and have the solid parts of the texture block the light but have the alpha parts allow the light to shine through. The idea is to be similar to having an object lit by a halo spot and have the object block part of the halo…only done with a texture instead of an actual object.
Not sure if this is what your after, but attached is a blend file which has a large plane which has another plane placed upon it that has a transparent color texture on it that has a light shined through it.
Hopefully you will be able to pick it apart for the settings you need.
Thanks! I will take a look at it. I ended up trying what I wanted using multiple objects and it sort of works, but I have to use so many lights to get the effect I want that Blender crashes when I try to render. Maybe the texture idea will work better.
Edit…well that was annoying. I typed a response to this once already, but apparently took too long and it kicked me off. Here is what I am trying to do. However, it looks like I don’t have the hardware capacity to make it work. The render below is as large as I am able to do without Blender crashing.
Anyway, I am using buffered shadows so as to make the halo behave the way I want. And it looks like buffered shadows won’t work with a transparent texture. The render above uses individual mesh planes, rather than a texture.
Thanks for the help anyway. I learned something new.
