Don't know if there's an answer for this

Support Materials and Textures
1

Going to give it a shot though.

Is there a way (in blender) to blur or have light pass through outer edges of a mesh? May not be saying this correctly so I’m going to try it visually.


I don’t want to think of it more as ‘light bouncing off’ but a ‘light going through’ just the edges of a mesh.

Tried Sub Surface Scattering. It only helped a bit.

May be there’s no real answer, and I may have to fake in in Post Production. However, I’m thinking about doing some animation and to do it in post Will take forever. Any help will be appreciated.

2

if it is for hair yes you could do that easily in cycles,

by using the hair info node you can set it to go to transparant
At http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Hair_Rendering
you see an example for rainbow hair, such a color ramp could drive a shader mix of 2 materials too, one solid the other transparant.

As for cubes solid shapes, i think then a material that comes close to such effect woud be a volume material
but i doubt you egt much speed with it,

if your afraid of sharp edges, you might enable sampled motion blur under the render properties

However looking at the picture perhaps all you want is to add a glow in postprocessing, it works fast, and might be the effect your after.

3

I would do as Razorblade suggested for the hair
Having a material that trends to transparent at the tip is the classic way of getting the fine diffusion

For things like flesh then sub-surface scattering is usually the best
Otherwise the volume materials in Cycles are good to use

Fuzzy edges.png1366×715 222 KB

I did not notice a big performance hit when trying this
But I guess that depends on the remainder of the scene!

Best of luck

Martin

4

If physically, it is something severely damaged; if visually, then -post effect. Hair, made transparent at the ends would not produce this white half-circle cut in the back of the head. It is either light bouncing in the objective lenses due to distortions/ over exposition, saturation of nearby photocells or post production effect. In Blender you’re left with latter i guess.
While right mark would be light coming from the sun, left should be different light source - it would be not a natural behavior of light and too strong for the SSS imho.
Compositing can give sun visible light “in front” of the head and fresnel mixing in Emission component on grazing angles can make for the effect on hand.

comp.png991×435 233 KB


I did not move Sun here “in front” but this is certainly possible and would work for animation too. Light on the “leaves” is material having emission in it.