Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Fluffy Material

Spherical Blend Texture This technique maps a spherical blend texture to the outsides of an object. Create a new material and name it something intelligent. Create a new texture for this material, change the texture type to Blend, and then in the texture properties, change the blend shape to "Sphere". File:BNTP img1.png Back in the material buttons, go the "MapInput" tab and change the texture coordinates to Blank-Blank-Z and Nor and as demonstrated in the next screenshot: File:BNTP_img2.png Finally go the "MapTop" tab, and depress the Emit button and set the Texture Blending Mode to "Add": File:BNTP_img3.png That's all there is to it, and here is how it looks: File:Render_SphericalBlend.png Backlighting This is a technique that a rather famous blender user called "@ndy" uses. Very simple and effective. All you need to do is place a Hemi light BEHIND the object you want to light in respect to the active camera. Breakdown: First add a Hemi lamp to your scene: File:BNTP img10.png Next, Select the lamp THEN press and hold down the Shift key, and select the Camera. Press Control-C to bring up the copy attributes menu, and copy location AND rotation. File:BNTP img11.png Now select JUST your lamp, press R to rotate it, then press the X key TWICE to rotate around the local X axis. Using your numpad, key in "180" to rotate the object 180Degrees. All that remains to do is to press G to grab the lamp, then press Z TWICE to move along the local Z axis, and move the lamp until it is past and behind the object of interest. your resulting setup should look something like this: File:BNTP_img13.png And here is the rendered result: File:Render_Backlight.png Color ramp with input set to normal. Pretty straighforward, but many advise against it. Minnaert shader Available in 2.37, "Darkness"<1 actually brightens edge. A cool shader, but not very useful for this purpose.