Bloom

Jesse Moody · Feb 2007

Hey I'm trying to do a scene in max and want to add bloom out side of the windows and have the effect coming in. What is the best way you can suggest doing this?

EarthQuake · Feb 2007

quick and dirty bloom in PS:
duplicate layer, gausian blur at like 10px, set to 50% overlay
duplicate that, set to 50% screen
ISNTA BLOOM!!!! OMG

i think max has some built in bloom render thing too

erik! · Feb 2007

Neil Blevins has a way to fake bloom in Max. With some tweaking you can get fairly decent results.

Neil Blevins fake bloom

Jesse Moody · Feb 2007

yeah i just found the neil one and i'm playing with that. I was hoping to get some other methods as well.

poopinmymouth · Feb 2007

Don't duplicate the whole layer. Select by color and pick white as your color, lift THAT into a new layer, blur then put to screen. I have a premade action.
www.poopinmymouth.com/net/pcount/poopinmymouth_actions.atn

doc rob · Feb 2007

I prefer to duplicate the layer, squash the levels so that you're only getting the brighest brights and everything else is black, Gaussian Blur, and set to Color Dodge.

CrazyButcher · Feb 2007

Enviro -> Effects -> Lens Effects -> Glow
with source color, and apply to full image but check the option that says something about clamp or brightness or so, as that should glow everything that is bright (intensity > 1 whatever), which is exactly the same as cheap ingame blooming works.

then you must make sure that your outside has intensities greater than that... then again just some PS work, might do the trick, too.

malcolm · Feb 2007

Doc rob has it pretty close to what video game bloom does, the other suggestiongs are home brew style bloom that won't simulate what the 360 and ps3 does if that was the goal. Duplicate layer guassien blur set to linear dodge create adjustment layer of curves and hold down alt and click between the layers to link curves to just your bloom layer. Now you can adjust the threshold non destructively. Also you can use colour dodge or screen for different types of bloom but generally linear dodge is what programmers are used to as it seems to simulate additive.

CrazyButcher · Feb 2007

but wouldnt the duplicate layer thing require the image to be more than just 8-Bits per channel? I mean that is what the "real" bloom is about, so that you actually get the "overbright" pixels (greater > 1), which wouldnt be there after clamping to 1.0 which regular 8 bit does.

Jesse Moody · Feb 2007

I should have mentioned this earlier but i am doing this for a scene fly through / quick pan so doing it in max would probably be the best way unless I want to edit 100-300 or more frames.

rooster · Feb 2007

I think its possible to batch-process image files with ps though
edit: sorry don't know the details but I've heard of it being done

doc rob · Feb 2007

yeah, just render your movie to tga files, then create a photoshop action for your bloom and use photoshop to batch process the tgas (File->Automate->Batch). It works great.

Jesse Moody · Feb 2007

ahh good idea i didn't really think of that. i've done that for quite a few other things so it should work. man i'm glad i have multiple computers at home to render on and use my laptop to work on while stuff renders.

FatAssasin · Feb 2007

If you're doing any kind of movie making, get a compositing app like After Effects or Fusion, even Premiere or Vegas or lower end editors should have a glow filter. Batch processing single frames is going to get old very fast.

Jesse Moody · Feb 2007

it's just a quick render pan for a demo reel type deal. i have a spare computer so that would be doing all the rendering junk.

gamedev · Feb 2007

Hey Jesse,

you can do bloom in max using a luminance blur. Just add a blur in the effects tab, then follow the values in the screen shot. But, If I remember correctly it looks a bit odd in motion. Either way, give it a shot.

-Tyler

Bloom

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