Sphere lights in Cycles?

Greetings.

Is it possible to use sphere lights in Cycles? I’m quite used to create shiny flares by video composing in Blender Internal, and for such I usually use a very strong sphere light near objects.

In Cycles, however, things are different. Is there a way to use sphere lights in Cycles or at least to make a light shine only over one single object without affecting others?

Thanks in advance.

You can add mesh object (Ico Sphere) and assign an emission shader to it.

Not useful for me. I know I can do that, but I don’t want the sphere to appear. It’s simply a matter of making a strong point light affect only the nearby object (e.g.: A logo) and not others (e.g.: Floor, nearby objects).

Increase the size of the point light?

This is the most basic setup to do it with cycles compositing. It is not designed to match the reference exactly but to make it extremely obvious what everything does. You can clearly see that the icosphere light has no effect on suzanne and the floor. Compositing glare nodes produce the streaks, I am not sure how to get lense flare (The circles) in blender, it’s probably possible, photoshop (and AE probably) have a filter that does it nicely.

Layer 1 = Gold Text and animated icosphere light. Icosphere has camera ray disabled so it is not rendered.
Last layer = floor, suzanne, and a green key mesh light.

Packed blend on dropbox

The effect:

youtube direct link

The scene:


Thanks, Photox, I’ll give it a try. About the lens flare I posted, it was made in Blender video compositor only. The circles were done with a fog glow glare (only glare, mix at 1.0) suffering a lens distortion (to add that spectrum colors) and then being directionally blurred. Of course, I used color mix to add the result to a glare with fog glow and streaks. IMHO the result ended nice.

It’s a cool effect, I’ll have to try and make it.

I should mention that the gold shader in the blend was created by elbrujodelatribu
and there is a low res ibl image from sibl

You can set the size of a point lamp, which will give you a spherical lamp. Or you can use an actual sphere with emission and turn off its camera ray visibility.

Thanks, m9105826, but in this case, I want the light rays to “die” beyond the sphere.

Do you mean that you only want the reflection of the sphere light but the light should not illuminate the rest of the scene?
That should be possible by making the ico sphere only visible to reflection, deactivating everything else.

Use a falloff node to alter the distance light rays can travel from a light source.

I’ll check it out too. Many thanks, guys! :slight_smile:

BTW, I discovered a simple solution for the light that could be better for me in this particular case. Once again thanks to all. :slight_smile: