Halo effect
Hi, I want to do several intermittent lights in 3d studio max with an halo effect around them, but I want to do everything inside 3ds max, no postpro.
So I've made a test adding a plane on the top with an alpha in the opacity channel, activating additive opacity in the material (in standard material / extended parameters). It has color when it is on, but when it's off is grey, neutral.
The problem is that the plane illuminates all the time behind it with the color added, even when the light is off, and I don't want this.
Am I doing something wrong, or it's like that? Supossedly the plane should be illuminated and colored by the object behind it, not the inverse..
So I've made a test adding a plane on the top with an alpha in the opacity channel, activating additive opacity in the material (in standard material / extended parameters). It has color when it is on, but when it's off is grey, neutral.
The problem is that the plane illuminates all the time behind it with the color added, even when the light is off, and I don't want this.
Am I doing something wrong, or it's like that? Supossedly the plane should be illuminated and colored by the object behind it, not the inverse..
Replies
I've been making some tests in photoshop and I think what I'm looking for is some kind of overlay fussion mode.
But in Max in the extended parameters of the standard material I have only additive or substractive mode.. (and filter that could be the equivalent of a normal fusion mode in photoshop maybe?)
Is there any other way to do this?
Thats the problem. Also bloom is a purely additive operation. It will always brighten the color behind it, thats the entire point. But this usually isnt a problem because any pixel that blooms should generally be brighter than, or at least pretty close to white.
I was just trying to get this effect as I would in an external game engine but inside Max, and then I ran into this issue.
I believed that it would be easier.
I guess some game engines works that way for certain volumetric effects, without using postpro, isn't it?
I think your could render a nice 'glow', but if I'm not mistaken, it will require a Light-Tracer/Mental-Ray, with the specific glow set to camera, etc...
I tried this years ago, without plugins, I couldn't get it look and work properly without some serious elbow grease. So gave up and now pretty much do everything in game-engines.
Probably there are some plugins for that. Curiously your comment remembered me the BlurBeta plugin pack, where are a lot of tools for doing effects inside max. Maybe there is something useful there:
http://www.splutterfish.com/sf/WebContent/BlurPack
I'll check it when I have time, just for curiosity.
Thanx
Mental Ray has the Glare Camera Output shader that puts a glare around very bright surfaces.
That's exactly something I did a few years back, but if I'm not mistaken, it doesn't take into consideration camera distance unless you set it up manually, and when it did, it didn't respect 1:1 size match.
I could mistaken, and maybe it changed, but that was my last experience with it.
If so that's dead simple,
Hit 8 to open the environment and effects panel, select the effects tab, add a blur effect, under blur parameters open the pixel selection tab, uncheck whole image, check luminance and change the numbers to to get the desired effect.
Since glare happens in the camera's lens and not in the ether around the light, it ought to be independent of the distance.
I also didn't ever heard about Shaderfx. It looks good.
Thanx