# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Halo Materials

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## Introduction

Halos are a neat effect. Instead of giving a colour/texture to the faces
of a mesh, like normal Surface materials do, the Halo material ignores
the faces and renders representations of the vertices instead. This can
produce all kinds of ethereal, even ghostly, fantasy effects, of objects
that look like they're made out of light rather than ordinary solid
matter.

A halo material can also produce a *flare* effect. This is the "lens
flare" that happens when a physical camera is aimed at a very bright
light source; the spillage of light bouncing around inside the optics
produces coloured rings and other interesting artifacts on top of the
image. This has become such an accepted part of photography that
computer graphics programs like Blender, which do not suffer the
imperfections of physical lenses, go to a great deal of trouble to offer
a realistic flare effect.

Flare effects can also be achieved using compositing node and a material
with an \"emit\" value, such flares may in some circumstances render
faster and be simpler to control. This works for the Blender internal
render engine, as do flares generated with halos. This is done by
opening the node editor (switching the 3d viewer tab to one of these for
example) then clicking \"compositing nodes\" and \"use nodes\",
\"filters\" can then be added to produce these effects.

This tutorial will show you how to create an image representing a flare
effect in a picture of the Sun.

## Setting The Scene

Open a new default Blender document. Get rid of the default cube. Insert
a new UV Sphere mesh in its place, and set the number of segments and
rings to 24 each. Also set Smooth shading. This will be your Sun. Create
a new material for it, set the Diffuse colour to a suitable yellow.
Under the Shading panel in the material settings, look for the "Emit:"
slider and give it a value of 1.0 to make it look bright. Since the Sun
emits its own light, you don't need the separate default light, so get
rid of that.

Go to the World properties tab
![](Blender255WorldContextButton.png "Blender255WorldContextButton.png").
In the "World" sub-header, click on the colour swatch labelled "Horizon
Color" and assign a nice deep blue colour for your sky.

If you do a render now, you should see your bright yellow orb, but
without any flare effect.

## Adding The Flare

Now add a new Circle mesh; the default 32 vertices should be enough. By
default it lies in the X-Y plane, which again is fine. Move it along the
Y-axis a little closer to the camera (negative-Y direction), until it
lies outside your Sun sphere, but still close to it. Scale its size down
by 0.5. (It will probably be invisible when first created, because it is
initially inside your Sun sphere, but it will be initially selected, so
you can immediately press 
 and start moving the mouse without
pressing any buttons, and make it appear from inside the Sun). Create a
new material for it, and set the type to Halo.

In the Halo panel in the Material settings, increase the size to
3.0---this is the size of the fuzzy image that is rendered around each
vertex, and this value is sufficient for them all to run together into a
continuous ring. Reduce the Alpha to 0.05 to avoid overpowering the
image with the halo effect.

Go further down the halo Material settings, and find the Flare panel (in
Blender 2.75 you can check \"Flare\" but what settings you do, nothing
will work). Check the title box to enable this. Set the number of
Subflares to, say, 8 (this controls the number of separate halo
reflections that will be generated, though you probably won't be able to
distinguish that many). Set the Boost to 10 to make the subhalos
brighter than the original parent halo.

The Seed value in the Flare panel controls the particular flare pattern
that you see; each number produces a different effect. I chose the value
3 for this example.

**Where did the circle go?** Like any object with a halo material, the
circle object can be quite hard to see when it's not selected. If you
lose track of it, there are a couple of ways to find it again:

-   Select everything with . Now you
    can look for the ring of dots and 
    on it to select it exclusively.
-   Use the  window at the
    upper right. You should see it listed here under its default name of
    "Circle"; click with  to select it,
    and you should see the ring of dots appear in the 3D view.

If the circle object is still inside the Sun, then wireframe
 or bounding-box view modes may be
helpful to find it again.

## The Final Result

Now hit  to render, and you should see
something like this (the flare effect may not appear immediately with
the rest of the image, give it a few more seconds to appear):

![](HaloFlareSunExample.png "HaloFlareSunExample.png"){width="800"}

**Exercises:** Try different positions for the circle mesh; move it near
to the Sun (even partly in it), far from it, move it around to different
sides. How does this affect the flare pattern? Also try changing the
size of the circle mesh.

