emissive glow/bloom in max

Thegodzero

I haven't had to do this ever as i'm always worked in engine, but how would I go about getting the emissive bloom effect in max? I found a way to get spec bloom, but no emissive bloom.

Mark Dygert

Video post has a glow option, its not going to be realtime in the viewport but it will cause certain materials to glow. They won't emit light until you turn on advanced lighting like Radiosity or Light Tracer, something that bounces light. Each method has their disadvantages... The 3dsmax help files have a neon tutorial that might help.

If you want realtime bloom/glow in the viewport you can use ShaderFX, but it won't render, you can only screen capture.

Mental Ray or Vray, have better light emitting options than standard scanline but they have a lot of options, take forever to render and are hard to nail down if you haven't worked with them before.

Ace-Angel

Note however in that many cases, stuff like ShaderFX won't display Glow or any fancy effects in Max 2011+

At least, for many people.

Do you need a Viewport RT bloom or a Render one?

Danielmn

really easy in mental ray

go to the render setup -

click the renderer tab -

scroll down to camera shaders -

and check the output box by default there will be a glare shader in their. It works really nicely just copy it to the material box and you can adjust quality and light streaks.

The only bad think I have found is that when you want to just do a bloom pass you still have to render out the entire image. But if your not doing any post this is not a problem.

Thegodzero

Sweet! That seems to do the job. It's not as much control as I like having, but it works and that's better than nothing! Thank you!