“The glare effect that comes from watching a bright light, is a result of imperfect eyesight. “
“On photographs, this effect comes from using cheap optics.”
Searching the web for info about how to create a 3D glare effect, these are two of the “facts” that popped up.
Nevertheless, a lot of people are evidently requesting this effect, and there are also some programs that can offer this effect, like Blender and 3DS Max.
I like this effect, maybe because my eyesight has always been a bit weak.
I have made an earlier attempt to achieve this effect, and I have gotten some comments about it.
In a project I have been working on recently, I wanted to give myself another chance to make the effect a bit better than what I managed the last time.
I wanted to create an open glass sphere lamp, with a bulb inside that had a glare effect.
I ended up creating this:
Apart from the glass sphere lamp, the model consist of a bulb shaped object plus two textured boxes forming a cross. And then I have placed four sphere lights like this:
The cross is there to make sure that the glare is not lost when using other camera angles.
I ended up using a cross instead of a cylinder because the cylinder created some weird reflections on the inside of the lamp, and also made it difficult to light up both the bulb
and the glare at the same time.
Modifying the transparent .png texture used to create the glare effect, will of course make the effect stronger or weaker,
and changing the intensity and colour of the sphere lights will also make some changes:
If I had taken the time ( and effort ) to teach myself how to create these light sources inside an object, I could have made this into a nice model.
But I’m too lazy ( and too busy), and besides I would never find out how to change the colour of the light sources.
Maybe someone else in here knows how to do this?
Anyway, if anyone wants to use this lamp goup ( or parts of it ), be my guest! All the elements can be made invisible, so it’s fully customisable.
The project file is here. http://ceciliabr.com/Glare/GlareProject.sh3d
Cecilia
