My six year old an I are having fun experimenting with the Carrara 3 demo. I created a "sun" for him last night using a sphere primative and then applying the sun texture to it. We then added a bulb to the scene with a lens flare and glow effect top simulate a bright sun. Putting the bulb inside the sun sphere hides the bright glowing effect so my son wants to know, tonight, what property of the "sun" sphere do we have to set to make the bulb effect shine through the inside surface and light up the scene? Thanks! David (a soon to be Carrara owner, based on what I've been able to demo)

Put the bulb in front of the sun! Problem solved! It will not be visible in the render. Otherwise you could alter the trancparancy, but then you would get a see-through sun.

Turn off the Cast Shadows option for your Sphere, it's on the Properties panel under the name. Good luck, Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild 3D plug-ins for Carrara http://digitalcarversguild.com

Been playing around with some similar things. If I recall, several of the lighting effects do not work if there is a transparent object in the way. For instance, light cones with shadow effect can not be made to shine through a transmapped object (not with any combination of settings including no "Cast Shadows" and "no light interactions when fully transparent" in the material). Which means, of course, the only ways to get slivers of light falling through a lattice is to build the lattice instead of transmapping it, or use a gel on the light. So...putting the bulb in front of the sun is the simplest answer. Oh, by the way...the lense flare options include a very nice built-in glow effect. Open up the options panel and check out some of the stuff inside!

Ya, nomuse is right. Haven't tried it in C3 though. You could also make the sun texture with a full white value in the glow and turn the glare on. Just a thought. As for Erics point, if you put the bulb in the sun with the cast shadows turned off, then the light source is in the right spot. To get the effect from the light, I'd put ANOTHER spot light in front of the sun pointed directly at the camera with a beam angle set to teeny and turn on the effects for that light. Maybe this is too much too fast but there are TONS of things to see and do in Carrara. -Kix

As I remember, someone in here once mentioned adding a point-at modifier to the light, place it's hot-point in the middle of the sun, and tell it to point @ the camera with the thin beam-angle that Kix mentions. This way it will always have the bright spot right into the camera, and still be correctly positioned now matter what camera angle you have. Hope this helps! :>

Here's a sun thingamathinga that I did using two lights and one sphere. One light is a bulb light inside the sphere. The second light is a spot light pointing straight into the camera with an angle of 2 degrees. The sphere is textured with a bright yellow in the glow channel and the 3D aura is turned on. The spot light has the lens flare activated. The group of the two lights and sphere have been grouped into one single group with the "point at" behavior turned on to always point directly into the camera. I threw my flying saucer in for fun. Cool Experiement!!! -Kix

Just an FYI, you should really use a distant light instead of the bulb light. I used the bulb because of the funky oblique angle it made with my flying saucer. -Kix