Realistic LED look through dark glass....????

[Jonathan1981]

Hi, I'm trying to get a realistic looking LED aesthetic that will "glow" through a dark tinted piece of glass.... so far, my best attempt has been using "emissive" material set to very high value (150)... it looks ok but I don't like how emissive material flattens the object and doesn't show any detail.... I'm trying to go for realism here as much as possible... I've also tried the technique of putting a body within another "bulb" type body but didn't have good results (I might have had some settings wrong)... any suggestions/techniques to get this looking perfect would be greatly appreciated..

[guest84672]

Did you try an area light?

[Jonathan1981]

Tried area light and the light works well for glow effect but blows out the color so much, the color isn't as adjustable or tweakable as when setting to plain old emissive....   if anyone has played around with this sort of thing before, please let know what you came up with.

[mattjgerard]

I've done a ton of mesing around with LED's showing through cloudy plastics for LED indicators, and it seems that thereisn't one set of settings that works the best. What I have found is that compositing images in photoshop nets me the best result. I will render out an image that shows the led/plastic the best alone, and layer that over another render that has the light values cranked to get the glow and dispersion onto surrounding surfaces.

Also, I use hidden planes and geometry to throw light onto other objects so I can tweak the LED area light to look correct but not have to worry about it throwing light at the same time. ITs tricky, and every setup is a bit different. I'll see if I can dig up something that I was happy with.

My LED's usually have a clear plastic "button" that they are shining through, and for the light source I'll duplicate that, scale it to 80% so that its "inside" the original and apply the emissive/arealight/point light material to that. There was only once that I used the actual CAD geometry as the light source, and it was a pain. but had to since it was a clear led and needed to see it.

[Jonathan1981]

Hey Matt, I appreciate the thorough response. That's awesome, kinda weird how KS hasn't come up with an easier turnkey method for this, seems like something that would be used a lot in product design, projects etc. I might try some of the things you mentioned with the clear body to give a more diode like effect, I tried something similar to that couldn't get it to glow strong enough but I'm thinking I just might have had the emissive settings too low....
Yes, if you have samples of something successful, I'd love to see this for future reference..

thanks again!