Lighting Glare Effect (please help)

#1

Hello,

I am working on a project and am hoping to get some help on a lighting effect that I wish to emulate.

I am creating high quality/photo-realistic renderings of a massage pillow product. For one of the images, I need to render the product with some it’s lights on. Beneath the nylon type netting the pillow lights up to signify that the heater is on. The image below shows how the product looks in real-life.

I am using 3DS Max 2015 and V-Ray 3.0. This is one of my weaker areas in the production pipeline. I have just never been very successful at getting objects to light up and look realistic. I understand that for this particular scenario to work well, I first need to have a good material setup for the netting. I’m not so worried about this aspect and already have a fairly decent material that I am still tweaking. As I said, my main issue is how to get the lighting effect to look as good as possible.

How can get a similar representation as the above photograph? I have played with the V-Ray lens effects settings, but the bloom and glare effects never seem to work (I’m starting to wonder if it’s a bug as opposed to me not knowing how to use it). Is there another effect or environment effect that I should utilize like maybe V-Ray fog? What’s the best approach for the light objects themselves? Should they be light meshes, or just light spheres, or meshes that use the V-Ray light material?

I’ll be happy to provide any additional information if it would help.

Very confused on how to get the best results. Hoping someone can shed some light :slight_smile:

#2

The lighting spheres should best be recreated as vraylights in sphere mode.

As for the vray glare and bloom not looking realistic is most of the time because ppl dont realise what a pure linear image looks like. Most ppl try to get the same results as they see from photo’s or movies… which almost never are purely linear.

If you dont have a good understanding of this its best to just do the glow/glare/bloom in post using one of the many available filters (or do it manually by using blurred layers etc…)

#3

Thanks for the response. I’m honestly not sure I really follow what you mean by “pure linear image”. Sounds like linear workflow, but I am familiar with that and not sure how that would apply here anyway.

Also, it’s not that the vray lens effects glare and bloom isn’t looking realistic, it’s that it doesn’t seem to be showing any effect whatsoever. I’ve tried all sorts of settings and don’t notice any difference from one to the next. Anyone else experience this type of problem?

#4

Can you share an example scene?
So I might have a quick look at it

#5

Hi, I have worked on similar models in the past. And, as you, became very very frustrated with the lack of nice results.

Images that come straight from the render engine often need to be touched up. I used to be a “purist” thinking that images should come perfect as a result of good lighting and modelling.

Now I think it is much more efficient to use photoshop in a non-destructive way (layers!) to add the effects you want.

If you paint a large area over the spheres with the color of the light, then gaussian blur it to something that resembles the halo of the gloom, then play with opacity and blending options, try soft light or overlay.

Good luck!