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I'm trying to render a test for a large scale LED cube, and it would be cool to light it up virtually. I can't think of a way to add textures other than on the surface of the LEDs themselves (i.e. all of them being one colour, as opposed to some being the default plastic shaders and others being emissions). Currently, all balls are set to a procedural transparent plastic texture. What I want is for some balls to illuminate entirely and others to be off, like an LED cube, but in a definitive shape, like a lotus or wave. Rendered in cycles.

This is the cube for testing:

enter image description here

This would be an example of a shader effect that shows pixel for pixel an accurate image like this lotus:

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Are you trying to use an image texture, a procedural texture? What is your current shader tree now?Cycles or EEVEE? Please edit your question and share enough information so that other users will understand your goals and current progress. Thanks $\endgroup$
    – Timaroberts
    Commented Feb 11, 2021 at 4:54
  • $\begingroup$ Done. Please see edits. $\endgroup$
    – lakerice
    Commented Feb 11, 2021 at 5:02
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    $\begingroup$ Read blender.stackexchange.com/questions/39508/… "color" LEDs are small pixels of RGB emitters. $\endgroup$
    – susu
    Commented Feb 12, 2021 at 1:19
  • $\begingroup$ But if you want to use a single LED as a color pixel, just use the same emission material for all of the LEDs and usa an image texture that uses an empty as coordinates, like in the link above. $\endgroup$
    – susu
    Commented Feb 12, 2021 at 1:22
  • $\begingroup$ @susu thanks for the link...I tried that and it was very cool but it basically projected a 2D image on the balls. So I wouldn't have been able to see depth or be able to move the camera around and see the image in perspective. However, I was able to simply use a boolean modifier on the icosphere (see my answer) set to intersect and that kind of worked. $\endgroup$
    – lakerice
    Commented Feb 13, 2021 at 22:58

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So pretty simple solution actually...I basically used an object (in this case icosphere) inside the cube and gave it an emission shader and used the boolean modifier set to intersect with the cube. Not perfect, but did the job somewhat reasonably.

enter image description here

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