Trying to get in more practice in Blender so I can make 3D art that looks more like the stuff I already like. In this case, I started off trying to imitate some lighting effects from one of my favorite Kierano pieces

In this case, I wasn’t bothered about trying to match up all of the details of the character’s figure since I only had about an hour or two that I was willing to spend for the night. So I threw together a very simplistic figure from some beveled cubes and mostly focused on figuring out the lights.

After some frustration I popped into ChatGPT to ask why my emissive materials weren’t having the effect on the scene that I expected.

Makes sense. Very straightforward. So I hopped over to the render context, set my Device to GPU, clicked the Denoise Viewport option aaaaaand… immediately crashed.

Took a couple minutes to recover from the last autosaved, went back to Cycles in GPU mode but did NOT mess with the denoise options this time.

Anyway, after a bit of tinkering around I got this going.

Not particularly convincing or the most interesting looking thing, but it is kinda getting the vibe across. I also learned that when I want to have an emissive object serve ONLY as a light source and otherwise not be directly visible, I can hide it by going to Object Properties -> Visibility -> Ray Visibility -> and then uncheck Camera.

I found I lose track of my light objects when I do that though, so I toggle on the Wireframe under Viewport display if I’m still tinkering with the placement.

Either way, learned a bit and I got to look at some glowy stuff. So I’m calling that a win and heading to sleep. Later!