Blender 3D: Designing Objects

Creating a mesh-light material

In this recipe, we will see how to create a mesh-light material to be assigned to any mesh object and used as a source to light the scene.

Getting ready

Until now, we have used the default Lamp (a Point light) already present in the scene to light the scene. By enabling the node system for the Lamp, we have seen that it uses a material created by connecting an Emission node to the Lamp Output node.

The good news is that just because it's a material node, we can assign an Emission shader to a mesh, for example, to a Plane conveniently located, scaled, and rotated to point to the scene that is the center of interest. Such a light-emitting mesh is called a mesh-light. Being a mesh, the Emission shader node output must ...