Lighting a Light

[jeremybirn]

Try giving some incandescence or ambience to the light bulbs, so they are bright even without any light hitting them.

For glows, try rendering a pass that is JUST the bulbs: you could do this by hiding all your lights, or all but one dim or black light if you are required to have lights in the scene, and then without light the only thing visible would be the incandescent bulb objects. In a compositing program, Add a blurred copy of this pass over your main rendering, and it puts a glow around each bulb.

Against the chimney, you still need some light from the bulbs to be illuminating the wall behind them, though, so some real light sources might be in order.

-jeremy

Edit - also check the scaling of the brick texture vs. the size of a Christmas tree light.

[polyester]

I've been fighting the incandescence problem...I know there's a shader setting for it in maya but unfortunately I'm using Max so I have no idea what the equivalence would be. I have a self-illumination option but that causes it to loose its transperency the more I increase it. Each of the bulbs has an omni (ambient) light within it; is that kinda the right idea? I had been adding lens effects and rendering all at once instead of working with passes; I will try that next, thanks. The main problem is just trying to figure out what it is in max that would make the bulbs look brightly lit without losing the transparancy.

I had adjusted the scaling options already since I uploaded that picture; that's really the least of my worries but thank you for mentioning it. I have a lot of modeling and texture issues to work out, but the lighting is what I'm stuck on at the moment.

Thanks so much for the quick response. You're a big help

-Polyester

[3rd Dimentia]

Self illumination of the material is what you are looking for.

[3rd Dimentia]

you mention that when you turn up the self illumination, that the transparency dissapears. Have a look at a light globe when it's on and see if the transparency stays the same as when it's off.

[JeffPatton]

I had tested some materials trying to simulate lights too. You may have already tried a radiosity solution like this, Im not sure. If you want to try the materials, let me know and I will be happy to email them to you if you like? With some more tweaking, this may provide a good result.

http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/CG%20Posting/lighting%20test.jpg

[EricChadwick]

That looks great.

Marc Lorenz' Neon is another option...
http://angstraum.at/plugins/neon/index.htm

[3rd Dimentia]

Hey folical9, that's some nice looking materials you have there. I've not played with max's radiosity. I've heard it's a tad slow. I just finished a TVC where I had to make neon tubing and 200+ animated light globes on a tacky motel sign and used Vray GI. Was quite impressed with how that worked out. V quick to get the hang of and quite quick to render. Have you played with Vray GI? How do you compare it to the max radioisty stuff?

[JeffPatton]

Thanks for the comments about the materials. I have not tried VRay, I really need to do so. I keep hearing great things about it. I have tried the public demo version of Brazil to make neon. It was easy to do, but horribly slow. In all fairness, it was probably because I was using the demo version.

Here's a link to my file (ver. 5.1), if you would like to try and compare render times. I think I will go and download the trial of Vray today.

Download File (http://www.pixelperfectgraphics.biz/downloads/bulbs.zip)

[urgaffel]

Try putting a falloff map in the self illumination slot, set to perpendicular/parallel(l?). It should give you something to start with. Then you can adjust the curve and the colours for it.

Glow effect:

You don't have to put a lens effect on every light, you can instead put a lens effect on the object or the material. In the object properties, you have a spinner, the Objcet channel (aka g-buffer), it's usually set to 0. Select all your lights, give them a number, go into the lens effect rollout -> glow -> options and check "object" and put same number there as for the lightbulbs. Voilá, the lightbulbs are all effected :)

Search helpfile for "material effect channel" and "g-buffer" for more info.

[PiXeL_MoNKeY]

You may also want to look at Nik Clark's Glass Lights Example (http://www.nikclark.com/downloads/index.htm). It uses Brazil R/S as the renderer so make sure you have that installed if you plan on using it. Here is the link to the Brazil R/S Pubtest 0.4.53 (http://www.splutterfish.com/download/Brazil_test_0_4_53.zip) if you need it.

[polyester]

Yup...I finally figured out the assigning lens effect by material ID about a week ago. Saved me a huge headache (thanks Rob)

I ended up using falloff in advanced transparency, is that what you mean by putting a falloff map in the self illumination slot? Either way, the advanced transparency seemed to be what I was looking for. I also added an output map to the smaller Christmas lights' diffuse settings so I could tweak some additional self illumination there.

Here's how it's coming along:

http://www.polydimensions.net/string%20of%20lights5.jpg

I do have Brazil...I'll check out the Glass Lights thing thanks!

[polyester]

nevermind...after looking at Nik's glass lights example...I see what you mean about the perpendicular/parallel falloff. :)

gonna give it a shot.

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