glow...maya..mental ray..

ericdigital

I figure this should be relatively simply but it's been giving me a hard time. Can you use a texture map for glow and still render in mental ray? From what I've seen it doesn't seem to work. Would it better to just render the glow in software and comp it in after the fact? If so how can you just render glow with an alpha and not have the mesh interfering so I can comp it with a mental ray render? I know I've done this before but I've been absolutely brain dead trying to figure it out. Is there any third party shaders that would provide a better glow?

Any help on the subject would be much appreciated

glib

Glow in a render? Always do it in post. You can try to get fancy, or just render a separate pass where everything is assigned a black surface shader except your glowy bits which are assigned white. Then use that a mask in aftereffects/photoshop.

JordanW

buut if you really want to do it in mental ray add a lens shader in the render settings, you can add one called glare and it'll glow everything out that's brighter than 1.

here are some tuts w/ glare

http://masteringmentalray.surpass.nl/content/view/36/10/
http://masteringmentalray.surpass.nl/content/view/22/10/
http://www.redcultur.com/silkypixel/2008/06/08/3dsmax-glare-tutorial/

ericdigital

Thanks guys!

The glare is interesting, never heard of that before looking forward to messing around with it. Thanks for the resources Jordan!

JordanW

You can also do this in post.....Just make an image of your spots you want to bloom (so black with like the bright window masked in if thats your "bright" spot) Bring that in as a texture in an empty max scene and set it as your background, give it an output of like 1.5, then under render settings turn on the glare lens shader for mental ray, and bam awesome glare