Eye candy from specular highlights

specular flares

The picture above shows a few of the effects I've achieved using masses of low intensity lights placed near transparent objects with a high level of specularity.

Here is a simple recipe to test this technique. Add an object, and set its surface attributes to the following:

This produces an invisible object which only is revealed by the specular highlights, producing an area on screen that can approximate glowing regions of atmosphere. Note, it is best seen against dark backgrounds.

Next, make a mass of lights. Create a simple, small object such as a primitive disk with 50 or more facets. Go into pick faces mode, and select all. Fracture the object, using a scale of .001. You should see some very tiny dots where the disk previously was. Use the command Object/Slice, and the individual granular faces will turn into seperate objects grouped to a parent axis. Select a single child, and set its light attributes to the following.

Select the rest of the children objects, and apply attributes.

Move the group of lights close to the objects surface. from 1 to 4 imagine untils (closer is better). Quickrender with lights off and global background color = 0,0,0. You should get a bit of a glint. More and more lights, w. different colors makes the shine much better.

Here are some links to pages of examples. Each page is somewhat over 100K.

a page of thumbnails
another page of thumbnails
and another page

Note: this technique is processor intensive. On my p166, an array of 1700+ lights took about 17 minutes to render a 320 x 240 pic. However, some of the images were done with as few as 150 lights.