Light Effects

[Wordofcurse]

Thanks for checking out my thread.

I’m currently working on a halloween project and have recently been playing around with some cool light effects. But there is one really neat effect I found online that I can’t seem to figure out/replicate. It’s light rays coming out of a window painted onto a transparent mesh with emission or something similar… I can get either the rays on the mesh, or the mesh to be transparent, but not both. Even with a mix shader using a transparent shader etc… (Still somewhat limited knowledge with material nodes, but I get the basics).

If anyone has any thoughts on how to achieve something like this, it would be greatly appreciated!

Here’s an example of what I’m trying to achieve:

[Digitz]

It could be volumetrics, using a principled volume plugged into the volume of the material output.
I think it is transparency on the surface of the object though.
It does make a difference if you’re using Eevee or Cycles too.
But here are two examples of simple material setups to give a general effect like you’re showing.
These would need tweaking to give you exactly what you want. And maybe a Musgrave instead of Voronoi texture.

Surface Material:

Volume Material:

[Wordofcurse]

Hey Digitz, thanks for that really good answer! And that would work if I was keeping the project in blender, or wanted to use volumetrics. But If exporting, volumetrics don’t transfer well(as far as I know)… and I’m pretty sure it is on the surface as well. Infact I think I may have figured it out, apparently all I had to do was restart blender and my node setup seemed to work lol.

[FedPete]

You can use transparent images (light beams).

[Wordofcurse]

That’s a really interesting thought, and kinda what I did.

I managed to get it right the first ‘simple’ way that I did by painting an image plugged into the alpha value, but the alpha only displayed as black?, so I thought I did it wrong. Which is when I tried making it more complex without realizing that I had already figured it out. It was only when I restarted blender with it plugged into the alpha value on the principled bsdf did it start showing up transparent instead of black. Kind of annoying, but at least it worked. Using 2.90.1.