Neon lights

#1

I’m trying to create a ship interior with glowing lights like this:

http://www.3dtotal.com/team/interviews/chris_mullins/images/04.jpg

I’m using 3DS Max and Combustion. In your opinions how would you do this: in video post in 3ds max or would you add it on afterwards in Combusition. If the latter, how do you achieve suchan effect in Combustion?

Thanks.

#2

Combustion. Video post, is nothing more than a basic, basic MS Paint level combustion integrated into 3d Max. You have all of those operators in combustion, and if you don’t like the glow, you can just change it without re-rendering the entire scene.

The more you can do inside of combustion the better. I have fallen in love with rendering out HDRI frames and tweaking them in combustion. You can do so many things in real time in post that take minutes to hours to tweak inside of your 3d package.

So just render out a RPF file and tweak and adjust to your heart’s content. Make sure to render out all of the necessary layers though: Gbuffer, Object ID etc… that you need for that shot.

#3

Thanks for your reply - I thought that would be the case.

Do you know how I might go about create glowing lights that leave a trail. From what I remember about the trailer that JPG is taken from the lights left a trail (I seem to remember from an interview they used After Effects in that movie).

Thanks.

#4

You can use for create the lights the 3D glow of Combustion( Set objects or material ID in the 3DS MAX for the lights objects) and adjust the illuminationn of scene using the lights of Combustion, but you probably will need masks to simulate the effect of the light in other places of scene.

#5

Thanks! Can you apply operators to materials IDs (from max) in Combustion if you have rendered in Rich Pixel Format?

#6

You could certainly do it in max, without videopost. If usig MR, search the 3ds max forum with the words ‘neon lights’. There must be dozens. The solution is to follow Jeff Paton’s instructions (you can find about that and other MR cool stuff in the 3ds max resources forum - the MR shader discussion thread).
Using max will increase your rendering times, but, if more familiar with 3ds, may give you better control (no masking and other things like that needed, for those trails you could use the MR motion blur, etc).

All of the above is to show you an alternative (a really good one), but I would also take the combustion route - it’s easier to preview and ajust later.

#7

In MAX you can set the objetc ID in the properties menus of objects the material ID is create in agreement the number of material, you need create one object or material for each object in the scen (lights blue one object ID, green other ID, floor other ID). Also it is necessary you that you it indicates the channels that will be created with RPF files (export dialog in the 3ds MAX).
Look at this link


#8

If you want the lights to leave a trail, play with motion blur but adjust the sampling so that all of the samples are from past frames.

#9

Thanks all for the help; I will go down the Combustion route. I have rendered neon lighting in max before using Indirect Illumination in Brazil. It looked great but took an ice age to render . . . :frowning:

Thanks again.

#10

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