Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Fluffy Material

Spherical Blend Texture
This technique maps a spherical blend texture to the outsides of an object.

Create a new material and name it something intelligent. Create a new texture for this material, change the texture type to Blend, and then in the texture properties, change the blend shape to "Sphere".



Back in the material buttons, go the "MapInput" tab and change the texture coordinates to Blank-Blank-Z and Nor and as demonstrated in the next screenshot:

Finally go the "MapTop" tab, and depress the Emit button and set the Texture Blending Mode to "Add":

That's all there is to it, and here is how it looks:

Backlighting
This is a technique that a rather famous blender user called "@ndy" uses. Very simple and effective.

All you need to do is place a Hemi light BEHIND the object you want to light in respect to the active camera.

Breakdown: First add a Hemi lamp to your scene:



Next, Select the lamp THEN press and hold down the Shift key, and select the Camera. Press Control-C to bring up the copy attributes menu, and copy location AND rotation.



Now select JUST your lamp, press R to rotate it, then press the X key TWICE to rotate around the local X axis. Using your numpad, key in "180" to rotate the object 180Degrees.

All that remains to do is to press G to grab the lamp, then press Z TWICE to move along the local Z axis, and move the lamp until it is past and behind the object of interest. your resulting setup should look something like this:



And here is the rendered result:


 * Color ramp with input set to normal.

Pretty straighforward, but many advise against it.


 * Minnaert shader

Available in 2.37, "Darkness"<1 actually brightens edge. A cool shader, but not very useful for this purpose.