How do I stop coloured lights from going white?
I am trying to create an indicator LED, so I made a sphere primitive and gave it a red ambient channel at 100%
I want it to really glow bright, but turning up the ambient percentage washes out the colour and it just looks white.
How can I make a really bright LED?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Don't crank up the ambient. Set it to not cast shadows and place a point light inside it.
but then it will not be coloured by the sphere (if I turn shadows off). I want a bright red LED
Sorry bout being late. Remember the light saber trick in the Uber-thread for candles? Make that fuzzy field the size of the LED lens. It's a thought anyways.
It also may be a matter of the ambient brightness, and the camera mimicking real-cam-burn-out effect. Unfortunately brightness is a relative term, how bright is the scene the lad is in (just for the thought, not actually asking). The LED will need to be at-least as bright as the total amount of light hitting it from other places in the scene. If the scene is to bright, it simply will not look bright.
Let me get some coffee, and I'll try to make an LED out of some primitives. And use that Shader trick with a point-light.
Is this the sort of effect you are talking about. I made the sphere into an uber Area Light.
I don't think so, the lens disappears when the "Glow" shader is applied to it.
I was able to do that months back, and have the cylinder boundary visible, tho that was with a Uber-tube-light, not a menu-point light. Guessing from the following post, and fudging the rest, lol.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/633185/
And with your example, the light is still to dim, tho I think this effect may be necessary to make it appear supper bright.
(edit)
it just dawned on me, I need a second sphere for the lens from the bright effect sphere.
(edit2 8:22UTC)
I am so sorry version3, that was worded completely wrong. "That Effect" not "this", Ambient alone is not enough, damn my spelling. I'll go hide in the corner now.
Getting There, needs more tinkering.
(edit)
The glow effect sphere is the larger one.
Now That looks bright in the scene tab, lol.
I wasn't trying for perfection. It was put together and rendered in under two minutes and also I wasn't asking you the question I was asking the original poster.
My apologies, I was not intending to answer for him. thoughts kind of got garbled there, lack of coffee in the brain. Yes I think he was attempting the conversion of a surface into a light trick, and not able to make it appear bright enough. Even with my attempt from a different method, it is still to dim.
I have a funny rendering now, I cheated, and added a second point-light outside and behind the "Glow" effect sphere. If his LED is in a control panel of sorts, that wont work.
Well it was worth a try. apparently, red is as red will get, lol.
200% is as bright as a menu-point light will get, and it is not enough inside a Glow-effect to cast overwhelming light around the scene. A second one was needed for my attempt.
I'm also open for ideas that don't require hiding a second light next to a LED.
Click on the gear-wheel in the upper right corner of the intensity slider => Parameter settings => Set the max. limit to any number you need.
Now I didn't think of that. Tho I noticed no cast light, let alone an increase of cast light, when I brought the one point light in the LED from 100% up to 200%. I had to add one outside, before light would illuminate other stuff.
Here is the one LED, with the point light at 400%, drastic lack of light from the LED by it's self.
We need more power Scotty, lol.
Have you tried a linear point light so you have control over the star and end falloff, point lights don't radiate much light.
Have you tried a linear point light so you have control over the star and end falloff, point lights don't radiate much light.
The idea with the linear point light to control the fall off sounds promising.
A suggestion for further experiments could be, to replace the point light with a spotlight and dial up the spread angle . As far as I remember a spread angle at 180 will give a lighting effect similar to a point light.
The idea with the linear point light to control the fall off sounds promising.
A suggestion for further experiments could be, to replace the point light with a spotlight and dial up the spread angle . As far as I remember a spread angle at 180 will give a lighting effect similar to a point light.
And if you have the Advanced Spotlights you can go beyond 180 and control the falloff rate. ;-)
A lot of lights have the fall off rate (or "Decay"), just not all of them. Been looking for that make something not cast a shadow trick, without disabling ray-trace shadows. Allot of skin textures respond badly to non-shadow lights, so for now the sphere is just at 50% opacity, with the decay beginning just beyond the sphere (far right).
I was not able to locate the convert-surface-to-light thing, yet.
Left-to-right.
Linear point light, red (255r,0g,0b), at 200% intensity. fall off begins beyond sphere.
Sphere with "Glow" shader applied, 50% opacity, red (255r,0g,0b).
Regular Primitive, EVERYTHING red (255r,0g,0b), diffuse 100%, ambient 100%, reflection 100%, refraction 100%.
Linear point light, red (255r,0g,0b), at 200% intensity. fall off begins beyond sphere.
Sphere with "Glow" shader applied, 100% opacity, red (255r,0g,0b).
Pointlight, resized to be larger then the sphere. red (255r,0g,0b), at 50% intensity.
Red diffuse plastic primitive (No ambient, No reflection, No refraction, No Specular), 50% opacity
Linear point light, red (255r,0g,0b), at 200% intensity. fall off begins beyond sphere.
Red diffuse plastic primitive (No ambient, No reflection, No refraction, No Specular), 50% opacity
Whether an object cast shadows or not can be set in the Parameters tab for it. It is the UberArea Light that turns a surface in to a light source. It is found under; Light Presets / omnifreaker / UberAreaLight / !UberAreaLight Base in the Content Library tab. It is a shader so it has to be applied like all other shaders, select object in the Scene tab and select the surface in the Surface tab (if you use the Surface Select tool the object will be selected with the surface).
And here I was fumbling threw the surface tab for that shadow thing, lol. Will add them now. Thanks.
I had seen a uber light thing (in the shader-Builder-thing), tho it wanted a light selected, so I guessed that was the wrong one, thanks for the pointer in the correct direction. Two more lights to add. We will have a bright LED eventually, lol.
As for the amendment, added a mat to make it easier to see what ones were casting light, and increased the 'Point-light' from 50% to 100% intensity (forth to the right, it's sphere is selected in the screen-cap).
wow! what an amazing response to my question! Thanks everyone... but where do i start?
I did think of using an uberarealight on a sphere primitive, but I am not actually all that interested in it actually "casting" light on other objects. I really just want an LED that appears to glow (with that nice hazy glow around it). In a low light situation, which is what I have, an LED would glow quite a bit, but its low power means it wouldn't actually cast much light (more than a few cm).
I was trying to find what you told me about making candles glow, but I couldn't find the thread... is it with some kind of glow shader? (if it is, I don't have one)
it started here;
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/633185/
Yea, the uber surface can cast lots of light, however the surface of the light just dose not get bright at all... oh render is done. BRB.
here are my various attempts... left is a linear point light (red) inside a sphere, middle is just an uberarea light and right is a sphere with 100% red ambient.
None of them glow!
so the lineup now is, with no shadow lens, and then Uber added to the right. There in order from left to right in the scene tab of the screen-cap.
1 and 3, are just linier point lights, inside a sphere with the "Glow" shader-maker thing added to the sphere.
1 the sphere is at 50% opacity, and 3 is at full 100% default.
For that led, I had to shrink the scaling of the light, so that wire frame was in the effect primitive sphere. The amount of light cast across the room can be set by the "Opacity Strength". (Edit; with the "Glow" effect shader surface applied to the sphere)
The falloff Start in the test was at 30, because the sphere is about a foot across. The LED is much smaller.
I used the shift key to select both Light and Shadow, to make it visible in one screen-cap.
(edit 2)
I'm not even using glorious Uber lights or DzLights, these are all the menu lights except the Ambient-surface and Uber-shader-surface ones.
I have just tried this glow shader thingy, and it seems to glow without needing a point light inside it. I wondered what you added a point light to yours?
so with the opacity down a tad, it could cast light. at lest on neighboring switches and do-dads, lol.
That far left ball, is lighting up the wall, and Fw Eve, lol. 200% is allot of light at point blank.
(edit)
That effect by itself dose look good, you may have it there.
right. understood.
Thanks SO much for your help. It's really appreciated.
Multiple ideas come to my mind, how to use those different effects, especially for magic spheres. :)
Thanks Zarcon and everybody who was involved!
your welcome, and there are also many options for magic spheres. There are per-packaged ones made by PA's, some free others not. Then there are the options of applying maps to glowing things, something I have yet to mess with. Something for another thread and time, when I'm not in the middle of a dozen other things.
I'm pleased with the side by side light comparison, I've needed to do that months ago. Now I must go and expand on it, elsewhere. Enjoy y'all, and have fun.
A bit of a 'gotcha' with omnifreakers shaders is many of the functions, like Ambient in the UberArea Light, have an off/on switch. This has tripped me up a number of times.
A basic 'physics 101' and light lesson. In the real world a light only appears to glow when there are particles in the air large enough to catch the light. Of course even in 'clear' air there always some particles so in a dim light situation most lights will have a slight glow halo. I feel Hollywood has conditioned us to think all lights glow brightly as they often use smoke and fog to set a mood.