Create Light Glare in Architectural Renders with Blender’s Glare Node

What will you learn in this guide?

In architectural visualization, the impact of the final image depends not only on scene lighting and materials; post-render image processing can also change how bright areas are perceived. Blender’s Glare Node processes prominent bright areas to create a soft glow, beams of light or streaks resembling lens reflections. In this guide, we’ll cover how to build a node tree in the Compositor, choose a Glare type and control its effect on the image.

This process works on a rendered image, so it does not replace the light sources or lighting setup in the scene. It can be used to soften brightness around windows in interior visuals or to emphasize a distinct light source in the image. Whether the result looks natural or stylized depends on the brightness distribution in the image as well as the effect you choose.

Requirements and preparation

Blender’s Glare Node and Compositor documentation does not specify a particular version number, hardware requirement or computing condition. The steps below are therefore based on the Compositor and Glare Node features described in the documentation.

First, have a rendered image of the scene ready. Open the Compositor and create a new node tree using the New button at the top. To make the tree run during rendering, enable Compositing Pipeline under Post Processing in the Output properties. If this option is off, the operations in the node tree will not be applied to the render output.

Using the Glare Node step by step

1. Set up the image-processing tree. Click New in the Compositor to create a node tree. Connect the rendered image to the Glare Node’s Image input and include the processed image in the output chain. The Compositor processes the image frame by frame, whether you use a single image, a video or a numbered image sequence.

2. Choose a Glare type that suits the visual goal. Use Bloom for a soft glow around bright spots. Fog Glow produces a softer glow; Blender’s documentation describes it as a physically more realistic option than Bloom, while also noting that it may require more computation time. Ghosts creates streaks resembling overlapping lens reflections. Streaks draws lines from bright areas, while Simple Star offers a simpler, star-shaped alternative to this lined effect.

   Sun Beams gives the impression of bright light scattering through an environment. You can also use the Kernel type to apply a custom filter defined by numeric values or an image. Each option serves a different visual style. In architectural imagery, the goal is not simply to increase brightness, but to decide where you want to direct the viewer’s attention.

3. Set which areas the effect will cover. Treat Threshold as a cutoff that selects the areas affected by the glare. Lowering the threshold brings more bright areas into the effect; raising it narrows the effect to the strongest lights. Revisit this setting if broad surfaces glow unintentionally in an interior render, or if the light around a window is disappearing. Smoothness affects how soft the transitions look around selected bright areas; higher values create a more gradual transition.

4. Balance intensity and spread. Strength changes the overall power of the Glare effect. Values above 1 increase the effect’s brightness, while values below 1 allow more of the original image to show through. Saturation adjusts the effect’s color saturation, and Tint changes the color of the glare. The Size setting, available for Bloom, Fog Glow and Sun Beams, determines how much of the image the effect covers. According to the example in the documentation, 1 spreads the effect across the full image width, while 0.5 corresponds to half of that.

   If the image has a wide range of brightness values, also consider the Clamp and Maximum controls. Maximum keeps bright spots below a defined upper value, which can help maintain a more consistent bloom when the brightness range is wide.

5. Create Sun Beams in a controlled way. Sun Position determines where the rays originate in the image. With the Glare Node selected, enabling Active Node Gizmo displays a cross-shaped control in the image preview for changing this position. You’ll need to prepare the source image to choose which areas generate rays. For example, you can treat the light source as a separate image, adjust brightness and contrast to isolate the areas that contribute to the rays, or use a mask. Blender’s documentation notes that the generated rays can be added over the original image, and that a simple Add Mix node will often be sufficient.

6. Preview and save the output. The Quality setting determines the resolution at which the Glare process is calculated. High works at full resolution; Medium uses a lower resolution to reduce computation time. Low is the fastest option, but also reduces detail. You can use low quality for quick tests and check the final image at a higher quality. Create a single frame with Render and save it using Save Image. For an image sequence, you can use the Animation button and its related settings. PNG, which supports an alpha channel, and EXR, which supports Z-depth data, are the format examples cited in the source for later compositing and use of Z-depth information, respectively.

Common issues

If the glare spreads across too large an area, check the Threshold value first; a lower threshold brings more areas into the effect. If the effect is missing from the intended lights, review the threshold alongside the brightness distribution in the input image. Raising Strength alone can throw off the overall balance of the image. Instead, test the threshold, transition softness and spread settings together.

When using Sun Beams, don’t treat every reflection in the image as a source that should generate rays. Blender’s documentation example emphasizes that light scattered from surfaces does not contribute to this type of scattering. You can use a separate source image, brightness and contrast adjustments, or a mask to define the areas that feed the rays. Also, don’t confuse tests made at Low or Medium quality with the detail level of the final output.

Where it fits in architectural and interior workflows

The Glare Node can be useful in interior and architectural renders where bright windows, sunlight or visible lighting fixtures need to stand out in the visual presentation. Since it is applied after rendering, it lets you work on the existing image, but it does not replace rebuilding the scene lighting. Using the same node tree across different images can help organize repetitive work, but the settings should be reviewed because each render may have a different brightness distribution.

Blender’s documentation does not provide information about licensing fees, specific hardware requirements or version compatibility. It notes that Fog Glow may take longer to compute, but does not give comparative timings for the other effects. For this reason, it can be helpful in offices and student projects to test the look in a preview first, then check the image intended for delivery. Before saving, confirm that Compositing Pipeline is enabled and that the image has been saved as expected.

Next steps

Try Bloom, then Fog Glow or Streaks on the same render to compare how each effect changes the image’s visual style. The Glare Node provides not only the image with the effect applied, but also a separate Glare output and a Highlights output containing the bright areas used to create the effect. These outputs are useful for assessing the glare separately from the rest of the image or using it in other compositing operations.

When working with an animation or image sequence, check how the output looks across different frames, not just in a single one. The Compositor processes images frame by frame; for the final save, use Save Image for a single image or Animation for a sequence.

Source and license

This guide was translated into Turkish and adapted from the “Glare Node” and “Introduction” pages in the Blender Manual. Both sources are published under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.