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How can I get this glow like effect? This is my model with two reference images. I wanted to recreate some bright touch keys like the ones with a soft glowing led that seems to pass through the material with a sort of transparency, but I can't get a realistic effect. I'm using just an emission node but it is not enough to achive that sort of subscattered appearance. Can someone help?

Thanks

ng

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    $\begingroup$ You could try a variation on this (rather wonderful) answer $\endgroup$ – Robin Betts May 4 at 19:42
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    $\begingroup$ Possible duplicate of: blender.stackexchange.com/questions/24886/… $\endgroup$ – cegaton May 4 at 20:23
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    $\begingroup$ It is not a bad question, but 'Led light through material' is a really poorly formed title. I think the question would benefit greatly if it had a normal title. I would recommend trying to define what you are asking clearly and shortly and form it as a question in the title. Something like "How can I recreate the soft glow effect on LED segment displays realistically using Cycles?" could work. At least try to do that with your future questions. It's just clearer, easier for everyone and you will most likely get better answers faster. $\endgroup$ – Martynas Žiemys May 4 at 21:31
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks @MartinZ for pointing this out, I'll keep it in mind for future questions. I wanted to be concise, but since English is not my mother tongue I did not realize that I could not be interpreted the right way. $\endgroup$ – Alessandro May 5 at 15:59
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You need to do that in post. The compositor to be precise.

In the passes you need to enable the emission pass

In the compositor you can now see

  1. Image
  2. Alpha
  3. Depth
  4. Emission

You add a glare node and set it to fog glow and plug the emission in the color inout, play with the settings till it matches the reference

Now you need a mix Color, plug the glare node in the top and the image node in the bottom.

Set the mix node to add

Now you can play with the values, the higher the add factor the more it will shine and look like it's scattering in the material and coming out glowing.

But rigth now it's not what you want, you want a scattering look. You need to add an object index value to the object and use this as a mask in the mix color node to only add the glow effect where the object is, this will make it seem like it goes throu the object and not throu the air too.

Note that this is the efficient variation. You can use subsurface scattering but it will pump your render times into infinity and beyond

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you very much, it seems to me the most appropriate way. $\endgroup$ – Alessandro May 5 at 16:00
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In addition to enabling 'Glare' in the compositor, you should put some kind of material on top of the emmission. This could be transmission or something similar. Why? Because no lights IRL are a solid block of light - they at least have glass or (in this case) plastic on top.

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