Glow

[winberg]

A feature that I would find helpful would be some kind of "real" glow or highlight flare off overly bright reflections like in real life...

-Tom

[GoncaloP]

[J_Bug]

Are you talking about on a VRay light, like lights in say Power Animator where glow is a property of the light? I've been looking for something like this to make exterior environments for VRay box camera rendering and HDR image export with the sf plugin.
sounds like a great idea

--Jon

[hungryp]

Something like in the gallery www.savinoff.com I imagine...
He uses those glows around bright areas in almost all of his images, and it really does increase their visual attractiveness.

[winberg]

Yeah, I am talking about the same effect you get by duplicating your rendering after some levels tweaking and putting some blur on it (with screen adding)....

However this is not the a correct way....Imagine taking a picture of a lightbulb. or taking a picture of some shiny metal out in the sunlight....that is the glow I am talking about...

-Tom

[vlado]

My guess is that this kind of effect would be quite slow to calculate by raytracing; the principle is the same as the depth-of-field effect, however, since the glow is very subtle and blurry, it would require lots of rays to get it smooth enough...

Best regards,
Vlado

[metroberlin]

that´s why they´ve invented photoshop and all the plugins. i thinks it´s not necessary that vray is able do that, too. even when it´s so complicated as vlado said.

[Daniele]

I've used glow effect in mental ray (as material option), and It seems to be quite fast...

[winberg]

Can you show me some examples of this please?..

-Tom

[s7en]

I'm suprised no-one mentioned the RenderEffect- SpecularBloom.ms maxscript plugin that comes with Max yet - admittedly its only a variation of the Blur render effect, but its a step in the right direction.

Problem with it is its limited to the 255 levels of brightness of the image, and cant's distinguish a brightly lit object from a white one.

If there was a way of getting it work with the extra lighting data of Vray and HDRI/EXR images it would become very useful.

On a broader note does anyone know if Render Effects can access the extra lighting data or is this a limitation in Max?

If not, will Vray's own VFB allow for render effects to work with the extra light data? Or will it even have its own VrayRender Effects rollout? Now theres something for the wishlist.

[joakimlinden]

It shouldn't be too difficult should it? Just think that at rendertime the renderer works in high dynamic range. This could allow you to add simple blur by the intensity of the sampled spot, the more intense the more blur.
The problem with max's regular blur is that it, to my knowledge, only works in regular RGB space so white is white - nothing more. If you made a plugin that had access to the real values, unclamped, you could instruct it to start blurring at levels way beyond R:255 G:255 B:255 which would probably produce a pretty good result. I think this feature is available in the HDRI program Photogenics.

[winberg]

It shouldn't be too difficult should it? Just think that at rendertime the renderer works in high dynamic range. This could allow you to add simple blur by the intensity of the sampled spot, the more intense the more blur.
The problem with max's regular blur is that it, to my knowledge, only works in regular RGB space so white is white - nothing more. If you made a plugin that had access to the real values, unclamped, you could instruct it to start blurring at levels way beyond R:255 G:255 B:255 which would probably produce a pretty good result. I think this feature is available in the HDRI program Photogenics.

This is exactly what I was thinking of..

-Tom

[marumari]

Specular Bloom

With the render effect Lense Effects, you can use a raytrace material/map and reflect a material effects ID. Just make a giant white ball for the sun and set the effects ID channel in the sun material.
It seems to work pretty well for stills - I tried animating but it was too sparkly. If anyone knows how to make that smoother, I'd like to know.

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[hansandersnord]

Output

Cant you use Output from the mat.editor to get glow?
/H

[GoncaloP]

Better dont, unless you want some white glow splotches