Lighting

There is one other type of lighting option that is available in Rhino that has not been mentioned. Self-Illuminated materials, that are not available via Rhino’s Light panel section, must be considered an additional lighting option.

Self-Illumination will act in a similar way as a Point Light but instead of emitting that light from one point, the light is emitted from the entire surface where the material is applied.

In the example screenshot below you can see that a cube object has been placed in the scene, highlighted in the Rhino Viewport as a yellow cube. This object initially requires that a default material is assigned to one or all of it’s surfaces and that the Material Type is set to Custom in the Rhino Material panel, or to Enscape if you want to use the Enscape Material Editor to adjust the emissive material.

Under the Advanced Settings section of the Material panel, make sure that Self-illumination is checked. Then set the Emission color.

Additionally, if editing the material in the Enscape Material Editor, then you can also adjust the materials luminosity.

To see the emissive surface in action, set the time of day in the Enscape window to night hours.