Strong emitting light within simple ambient occlusion bake ?

Acumen

alright, i have another question. since i can't texture and won't learn it in 1000 years i use the ambient occlusion rendering method within 3dsmax (scanline render with light tracer) as a base for all of my tf2-models. no every now and then i have these "light sources" in my models (especially on my lights pack ) and i'd like them to emit more/stronger light. for example when i have little plastic buttons that should glow and emit a strong light to the place they are positioned at, for example on this model:


it's like everything has the same shading/specular value while i want the buttons to have this certain specular highlight on it to pop out a bit more.
how would i go about achieving this desired effect ? cause in my rendering unqualification i tried to just give some specular highlight to the simple colored materials and hoped it would have some impact on its surrounding which obviously isn't the case.
did i just miss a single checker box in one of the menus (materials/lights/render/light tracer) or is this a bit more complicated than i think it is ? or is my thought just exactly against the common use of an ambient occlusion method in general and i'm missing the point completely ?

Xenobond

http://plugins.marclorenz.com/neon/index.htm
I used this a lot when lighting Imperator & Camelot dungeons.
You'll end up using the radiosity lighting solution in the scanline renderer.
you can set a color value, or use a texture as the output

Acumen

while this looks like the ideal solution it somehow doesn't want to install the script. get an error everytime i put the mzp into max. maybe it's too old, last release was 2002 if i read that correctly

Mark Dygert

The best and fastest way I've found without using plug-ins or scripts, is to use Mental Ray.

http://www.quality3dmodels.com/Tutorials/3dsmax/neonlight/neonglow.html
http://www.freeitsolutions.com/3ds/viewTutorial.aspx?id=202

Sandro

Is it for nice rendering or actual game asset?

If it's for rendering, you can just select those buttons with magic wand maybe, duplicate on separate layer, switch to screen mode and apply some gaussian blur. Like this

`


You can place yellowy omni light with limited distance near keypad to actually cast some light on surrounding objects.

If it's in-game asset then you can place omnis, bake out lighting pass and mix it with diffuse.

Mark Dygert

I think he wants to bake the glow into the diffuse texture?

Acumen

thanks guys for your answers, so far
yes, baking the light into the diffuse.
found lots of vig posts in all the different 3d forums when i searched for this subject !
i gotta say i'm not against scripts or plugins - so if anyone has something else than this NEON-script - let me know
this whole mental ray stuff is not my stuff, atm i gotta say - but I'll experiment with it nevertheless

Sandro

If you don't want to mess with mentalray and finalgather stuff you can always hand-place some colored lights and bake out lighting pass separately, which can be then screened on top of original diffuse. Or bake out complete map with handplaced lights + skylight

Acumen

yeh i tried your suggestion earlier this day and it works out alright if i fiddle around with the distance, like you said !
works alright for my needs, imo. so thanks again for your precious help, guys !

Xoliul

Acumen wrote: »

alright, i have another question. since i can't texture and won't learn it in 1000 years i use the ambient occlusion rendering method within 3dsmax (scanline render with light tracer) as a base for all of my tf2-models.

Little bit offtopic, but: Texturing for TF2 should be REALLY simple, you're almost there if you have AO and base colors down. Just look at some of their textures through GCFscape and VTFedit.
Generally what they do is:
large to medium scale, subtle color variations with a square brush. ZhuZhu's brushes include one (it's something like "oil 125", dunno) that's perfect for this. Just set it to low opacity and flow and paint some lighter and darker spots.
Soft, brownish rust tones. Just use a softer brush, really simple, they sometimes do it in a few gradations on top of each other.
wear/paint chipping by just painting grey spots with a shap squarish brush. Really adds a lot.

Acumen

hey Xoliul, thanks a ton for that link ! i had downloaded many brush collections but this oil brush is a really nice addition - just tried it and it works like a charm. thanks a lot
you're little breakdown is also really informative - great stuff to keep in mind !