Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
The good news is that just because it's a material node, we can assign an Emission shader
to a mesh, for example, to a Plane conveniently located, scaled, and rotated to point to the
scene that is the center of interest. Such a light-emitting mesh is called a mesh-light. Being
a mesh, the Emission shader node output must be connected to the Surface (or the Volume)
input socket of a Material Output node instead of the Lamp Output node.
Light emission coming from a surface and not from a point is a lot more diffused and softer
than the light from a Lamp. A mesh-light can be any mesh of any shape, so it can be used as
an object taking part in the scene and be the real light source of the rendering at the same
time, for example, a table lamp, or a neon sign, or a television screen. As a pure light-emitting
Plane, it's usually used as a sort of photographic diffuser. Two or three strategically placed
mesh-lights can realistically simulate a photo studio situation. To replace the Lamp with a
mesh-light, Plane perform the following steps:
1.
Call the Blender User Preferences panel (
Ctrl
+
Alt
+
U
), navigate to the Addons
tab, and click on 3D View under Categories on the left. Check the Copy Attributes
Menu box to the right-hand side of the 3D View option, and click on the Save User
Settings button in the bottom-left corner of the panel. Then close the panel.
2.
Starting from the
start_07.blend
file, click on the eye icon of Lamp in the
Outliner to enable its visibility again.
3.
Right-click on the Lamp in the 3D view and press
Shift
+
S
to bring up the Snap
menu. Click on the Cursor to Selected item.
4.
Press
Shift
+
A
with the mouse pointer in the 3D view and add a Plane to the scene
at the 3D Cursor's location.
5.
Press
Shift
and select the Lamp. Now you have both the recently added Plane and
the Lamp selected, and the latter is the active object.
6.
Press
Ctrl
+
C
to open the Copy Attributes menu and select the Copy Rotation item.
7.
Rename this Plane as
Emitter
.
8.
Right-click on the Lamp in the 3D view and press
X
to delete it.
9.
Put the mouse pointer on the 3D view and press
0
from the numeric keypad to go
to Camera view.
