Hi everyone!
I’m wondering if there’s a way to make a text visible by lighting it from the backside, as is often seen in movie trailers.
The effect should look like this:
Taken from this gimp-tutorial:
http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/rays-of-light-behind-text.html
… but of course: animated 
You can do that with a spotlight. Activate the halo feature. You may have to convert your font object to a mesh to achieve the full affect.
hm… thanks for the mesh-tip.
anyway, using a spotlight, was my first approach too, but it looked kind of dull…
i now added a halo-object with some flare effects. i’m still figuring out the best options but it looks quite promising so far…
only letdown is, that the halo isn’t animated, so it always has the same shape.
it would be nice if that could somehow be rotated.
btw. i tried adding a copy of the text as a halo object, so that the letters would have a glow effect to them - didn’t work though, because the vertices aren’t distributed evenly.
(the round shapes of the letters get a lot of verts, the straights none…)
Maybe someone knows a (non-manual) fix for that or another way to make the letters glow - but that’s secondary.
First i want to make those letters shine 
Halo really is a hack for true volumetric which Blender does not support at this time. I have not been able find a single external renderer that supports it either. This simple effect is what separates Blender from other “professional” render packages, IMHO. I hear talk that it is next on the list for the Lux renderer after this RC6 version gets out the door.
But anyway, what you can do with the halo lamp is to place another mesh in front of it and rotate that mesh, as the obstacle mesh rotates, it will change the light rays pattern emitted by the halo lamp. You can also move the lamp itself, and this will cause the rays to change as the text obscures the lamp.
ras_halo_lamp_1d.blend (260 KB)
Well…
i made the halo-lamp turn and rotate and tweaked the flare-object a bit… i’m quite happy with the result.
the trick with the rotating object in front is quite nice - especially for underwater scenes.
one could even make the object “cast only”, so that’s quite handy - not what i was looking for though, but thx anyway.
btw. your setup makes my blender crash if i change the frame a few times 
i’ll attach my “final” result (for the effect - i still need to add some frames at the beginning and find a good font before it is really done).
c&c welcome :yes:
Tetaion4.blend (189 KB)