How do you deal with area plane lights reflecting off of glossy objects in Eevee?

This topic has 8 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 10 months, 1 week ago by Kimberly T..

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November 4, 2025 at 11:53 am #20965
Kimberly T.
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The LED screen has a roughness of 0. I can introduce a higher roughness but that will kill the quality of the screen making it look dull.

I tried replacing the area plane light with a plane mesh using an emission shader but that isn’t enough to give the exact reflection desired like shown here. The emission shader just makes the object glow and not reflect off of surfaces.

I heard that the old Blender versions include a toggle “show emitter” but it would not make sense to use an old Blender version just to do that and go back to a new one and render it.

Is the lighting setup just faulty? In Cycles, I can just hide the emitter though and it will just be fine. But I am trying to render this in Eevee.
November 4, 2025 at 12:11 pm #97783
Martin Bergwerf
Participant
Hi Kimberly, I am not an EEVEE user, but would it work for you to turn down the Glossy Influence of the Light?
November 4, 2025 at 12:41 pm #97784
Omar Domenech
Participant
But it looks great, what is it that you don’t like about your light setup? It’s a tricky thing, doing lighting for product shots, exactly because of the issue you’re going through. Imagine trying to do it in real life, it’s a pain. There’s addons that let you live paint lights, they are super helpful. You can do a search on Super Hive.
November 4, 2025 at 12:44 pm #97785
Kimberly T.
Participant
Hi Martin!

I was using Blender 4.1 for the whole time and did not see that setting but I went in Blender 4.5 and was able to toggle that down, unfortunately however it does kill my light.

D:
November 4, 2025 at 1:09 pm #97786
Martin Bergwerf
Participant
What do you mean, the light is gone? That shouldn’t happen.

This is in 4.1. Green ball oin a glass Cube. The Area Light is the only light:
November 4, 2025 at 1:49 pm #97787
Kimberly T.
Participant
Martin, oh it’s most likely because my LED screen has Metallic bumped up making that appear as such. I think it might be my shader settings.

EDIT: Did it with metallic. I opened up a new project and replicated similar but when I turn down specular, the light dims down too.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8vxmurbg72wm5rsma7u2d/test.blend?rlkey=0x56nwi9nhklwoyfeakb55b2v&st=8tyr3sfa&dl=0
November 4, 2025 at 1:51 pm #97788
Kimberly T.
Participant
Hi Omar,

Thank you. I saw the area light plane reflecting off as a square from the LED screen which I thought was distracting. However, I forgot I bumped up my LED screen as 1.000 metallic and 0.000 roughness and this was most likely the expected result.
November 4, 2025 at 7:36 pm #97789
Dwayne Savage
Participant
Try setting metallic to 0.95 instead of 1. You may want to switch to a spot light instead of an area light. Area lights work better with light probes. This video by Andrew Price AKA Blender guru might help. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gW6vk_OuNQ
November 6, 2025 at 3:56 pm #97790
Kimberly T.
Participant
Thanks Dwayne! Yeah, I pretty much did that and just settled with the roughness being a tad more. This is more like a dummy project and not like much of a real watch/phone shoot I am aiming for but realistically there would be more than 1 layer and the outermost layer is the one with the most roughness so I just settled with bumping the roughness a bit. I learned that this project is cooked but I just settled with tweaking the metallic and roughness settings.

If I would start a new project like this one, I’d do things differently.

Thanks for the help!
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