ever thought MR was not able to render light-casting geometry? it can!
1.- Create gour geometry and decide which objects are going to cast light. (in this case, the letter R and the cubes)
2.-Create any standard light and turn it off (this prevents max’s default lighting to be activated) in this case i used a simple omni light
3.-Create a self-illuminating material with the diffuse map set to output (watch the settings carefully, red boxes indicate important aspects):
4.-Turn on Final Gather on the rendering dialog (the higher the samples, the smoother the light cast will be, for test renderings you can use 100, and for this one “final” i used 5000):
This is the result:
rendered in 5mins:22sec with 5000 FG samples in a 1.5Ghz P4M with min 1 samples per pixel, up to 16 samples per pixel.