Systems and methods for generating illumination effects for inserted luminous content, which may include augmented reality content that appears to emit light and is inserted into an image of a physical space. The content may include a polygonal mesh, which may be defined in part by a skeleton that has multiple joints. Examples may include generating a bounding box on a surface plane for the inserted content, determining an illumination center point location on the surface plane based on the content, generating an illumination entity based on the bounding box and the illumination center point location, and rendering the illumination entity using illumination values determined based on the illumination center point location. Examples may also include determining illumination contributions values for some of the joints, combining the illumination contribution values to generate illumination values for pixels, and rendering another illumination entity using the illumination values.