How to make objects illuminated from underneath

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  • Hi -


    I am trying to create bottle risers look like they are lit from underneath but nothing seems to be giving me this effect. I have tried the rectangular, line and spotlight options but they don't illuminate through the bottle...more so just around it. I don't want to highlight the walls, just the bottles - Any suggestions? I'm including some images of what I have in the model, what it's rendering as, and what I'm trying to achieve. I do a lot of restaurant renderings and this is something that keeps coming up so any input would be super helpful! Thanks!

    [Blocked Image: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/W/IMAGERENDERING_521856-T1/images/I/71GYZK4Zk2L._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg]

  • You have to make the glass material of the bottle itself a self illuminated material. The way a majority of rendering engines work (simplified) is the camera shoots out a invisible beam that bounces off a all the surfaces in its path collects all the data and then determines what the color of the pixel should be. If the beam never hits the light placed under the bottles it will never glow in the way you want it too. There are ways that engines work around or attempt to get the correct effect but those are typically more complex engines like 3dsmax and Vray, not Enscape which is more focused on speed than accuracy.

  • Transparent objects are hard to do in rendering - as Tearch has alluded too, Enscape is focussed on ease of user and speed of performance.


    I had a think about how I would do it and this was one approach







    Basically I've made the texture self emmissive so the object glows, then I have applied a gradient texture to the transparency slot so that only the bottom of the object really is making light, becoming more and more transparent towards the top.


    I've got a self emissive base also - but only to look like there is light coming from there - it's the bottles themselves making the glow.


    I then had to make some extra geometry , with a non transparent texture for the bottle label.


    You can play around with intensity and colour to try and change the appearance of the glass and glow

  • Adam.Fairclough Wow thank you! this is very helpful. I've never done a gradient before, but I see the settings you used. Where did you input the image of the gradient though? Onto the bottle itself? I will give this a try! Thanks :)

    In the example I used, the bottles had photo textures wrapped around them - not very tidy, but it means that a gradient that is applied is also wrapped and orientated correctly



    I applied a standard glass type material on the inside faces.


    It's all a bit of a "hack" to make this work, so you may find it doesn't look right in all lighting conditions, but it should be a relatively cheap way to produc the effect.