simple question : how to make objet become a light ?

[tonino]

is it possible make an objet become a light ?
thank you

[natty]

hi ..
you could either put a output map in the diffuse slot of a material or depending what vray version you have use the vray light material.
or another way would be to have a standard mat and self illuminate it and attach a vray material overide map to it and turn up the gi amount for that mat.

hope that answer's your question.

[percydaman]

yes give it a standard material 100% self illum and put an output map in the self illum slot. Up the RGB and output settings to adjust brightness. Or you can use the vray light material.

[natty]

lololol ...must have posted the same time Percy ..

[percydaman]

your getting old....and slow....

[natty]

heheh ... yes but still a little quicker than you ..

[percydaman]

umm...look up dude...I beat ya fair and square. LOL

[TishoChaos]

Making an object to become a light is the correct way of lighting in my opinion, because this way it gives the most realistic specularity on other objects. It was not possible before in max. Now you can do it as percy and natty said (sorry for repeating) in VRay with vraylightmat or with a standard one.

[chicoone]

TishoChaos,

Very fine point you make! As object receive light they also reflect it. Then it must be good where possible or needed to give a bit of self illumination to all materials! Correct?

Ismael

[tdarcy]

Percy,
you said,
"yes give it a standard material 100% self illum and put an output map in the self illum slot. Up the RGB and output settings to adjust brightness."

do you still need to put the vray override material on top of the standard material as well?

TD

[percydaman]

technically not if you do it that way. Another way to do it I believe is to just forgo the output map and give it a material wrapper and crank up the emit GI. Theres so many ways to do it these days...its nice

[TishoChaos]

chicoone: i meant this -> when an object is lit, what you see is the mix of its diffuse and reflection, nothing else. Now, it depends on the settings of the material of how much diffuse and how much reflect you will see. This is the theory - taking this in mind, when you have an object with more reflection than diffuse, it takes some of its environment, and specularities (highlights) are part of the environment. So, if you have an object which is with a VRayLightMat for example, this object will be reflected as a specularity on the object with the reflection. I hope I am clear enough

After all I said, you can make the conclusion that max's standard material specularity and glossiness are completely fake!

[Da_elf]

this was rendered purely with object lights. there were no 3dsmax lights in this scene. except an omni but it was turned off to get rid of default lights. this was with an ooooold version of vray way before the globals section.

[percydaman]

object lights are nice, but its harder to control their quality. its all tied to irradiance map quality.

[TishoChaos]

percy, maybe the control over the quality is the trade-off.

Da_elf, nice image man, i have seen this before and I like it, what is the object that became a light here? It gives quite nice specularity on the watches.