Blender 3d: Making A Glowing Glass Cube
Sunday, December 7, 2008
In the banner of this blog, you can notice the arrows look like they emit a "glow".
For this tutorial, I will teach you how to make something similar. A glowing cube.
Have a look at it:
It may sort of look like a radioactive substance, but I actually intended it to be some sort of light emitting glass cube. Let's go on to the tutorial:
Firstly, open up blender 3d. There should be a cube in the 3d view.
To simplify things, we shall be using the cube that's already there.
Here it is. It should be on your screen when you start Blender 3d.
With the cube in selection, go to the material settings. (press F5 for a shortcut)
Then apply the following settings - Color: Red, Emit: 0.500.
This causes the material to glow red.
Then, to give a glassy texture, go to the "Mirror Trans" tab and apply the following settings to mimic glass -
Ray Mirror - RayMir: 0.40, Fresnel: 1.0,
Ray Trans - IOR: 1.43, Fresnel: 1.0, Fac: 1.75,
To make the glowing halo, we need a separate cube that is similarly sized as the original one. Duplicate the cube by going to the "Object" menu, then press "Duplicate"
Alternatively, press Shift + D for a shortcut.
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It is a good practice to know the common keyboard shortcuts in Blender 3d for faster work. You'll still need to duplicate objects later on in this tutorial, so it will be helpful to remember Shift + D.
After duplicating the cube, we need to give it a different material. Under the materials settings, click on the material menu and click "ADD NEW".
Next, click on the "Halo" button. Then, apply the following settings - Color: Red, Alpha: 0.04
With the halo box still selected in 3d view, go to the edit mode.
Go to "Editing" (Press F9 for shortcut). Then, click on the "Subdivide" button for four times.
You will see that the vertices (the dots) on the 3d view double on every click. The aim here is to make enough dots, as each dot represents a halo ball. Once there is a huge number of halo balls squeezed together in the shape of a cube, they combine to create a cube looking halo.
After that, go back to object mode. There are some extra things that needed to be added in object mode.
The cube will look unrealistic if it is only glowing with a halo but not lighting up the near surroundings. We have to add lights into the cube. Press "Space" on your keyboard and go to Add -> Lamp -> Area.
Then, change the view to wireframe. This is so that the cube will look like wire skeletons, hence allowing us to see and edit the lamps we place inside.
Next, press "1" on your number pad to go to side view.
You should see the 3d view change from the one on the left to the on on the right.
Press R, and rotate the lamp 90 degrees clockwise. The lamp is initially faced down in the side view, the aim is to rotate it to shine sideways.
With the lamp selected, go to the "lamp buttons". Then, apply the following settings - Type: Area, Dist: 2.00, Energy: 0.25, Color: Red
Now, we have to create duplicates of the lamp. Firstly, go back to top view by pressing "7" on the number pad.
The aim now is to make the cube emit light in the north, south east west directions, so we need four lamps in total. Duplicate the lamp and rotate it 90 degrees. Repeat the duplicating and rotating, till you have four lamps in total, one facing each side of the cube.
Now, the glass cube is completed. Whats left is just the surroundings. For this example, we need to have a "floor" for the cube to sit on. If it is left alone, it will not look very nice. It needs a surface to shine its glow on to look more realistic.
In Blender 3d, there isn't a mesh called floor. However, there's a mesh called a "Plane", which is a flat panel, and this can do the job by looking like any flat object you want. (Floors, walls, ceilings, screens, etc.) Press "space" on your keyboard and go to Add -> Mesh -> Plane.
The plane is quite small by default. Press R and resize it to as larger, preferably several times the width of the cube.
Go to side view by pressing "1" on your number pad. Then, drag the plane to sit just right below the cube.
The plane needs to be given a nice material to showcase the cube's lighting effects. Go to the material settings (Press F5). Then, add a new material.
The colors and most of the settings are good enough for this example. What it lacks is a mirror-like surface. Go to "Mirror Trans", and apply the following settings - RayMir: 0.50, Fresnel: 3.0
Finally, we need to give the render a dark background. For this tutorial, lets make it black to simplify things. Go to "World Buttons", and change the color of the background from blue to black.
Press F12 and enjoy your render. =)
If you need the source file, you can download it here: glowcube.blend (214kb)
Improvements and suggestions:
- This tutorial uses a cube to simplify things. Its main purpose is to show the concept of making "glowing" objects. You can do the same for other objects of different shapes. Just remember to give it a separate mesh for the halo, and lights for the obvious sides.
- Sometimes, having a single halo for the glow may not be realistic enough. To solve this, you can duplicate the halo mesh, then give it a different color and change the halo size. This can combine two or more halos together to make a single halo that has a "gradient". An example would be a lightsaber, which the halo fades from a bright white to another color.
Labels: Blender 3d, Graphic Tutorials
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