lens effects and material ID

[patrick_anderson]

I set up some neon light materials for a project. I was following a vray 5 3ds max video whilst doing it. I set up the neon to be on a specific material ID but it appears that you can't specify a material ID just for lens effects. The image was good enough but I had bloom from all of my lights. Is this not available or did I miss something?

[fixeighted]

What you could do is to note the maximum pixel brightness of the lights that you do not want to be affected, then set your neon ones to achieve a higher brightness overall.
Then you can adjust the lens effects threshold to just affect those neon lights.

[nikoleta.garkova]

Hey patrick_anderson,

You might be watching an old tutorial; We removed the Material/Object ID masking in Lens Effects a while ago due to some known issues.

What fixeighted suggested is absolutely viable, or, alternatively, you can use the Glare channel to set up the desired effects per object/material in post-production.

[patrick_anderson]

I'll give both suggestions a go. Is this something that could be tweaked using the light mix thing? I personally haven't tried the light mix as to be quite honest, I haven't figure out how to open it up. I don't do 3d stuff all the time but the office knows I can pull an cool image out of my arse at short notice. I need to play with it more.

[fixeighted]

Yeah Lightmix works fine here and easier than messing with thresholds etc. In which case you can just leave the default threshold, set your lights up as you like, then turn off/on what you want.
Then you can just save the glare channel from each situation and comp as you like, having one setting for each light.

[patrick_anderson]

Has anyone done a tutorial on how to use lightmix? I'm still learning the vray 5 sketchup interface. I used to know where things were in Max and how that worked but that was ages ago.

[fixeighted]

It's pretty straighforward really. All it is allowing you to do is to interactively adjust the intensities of lights without
having to change them in the scene itself, so e.g. your case is perfect for that, as you can quickly dial in values to
get the effect you need, plus the separate glare channels.
If, after changing intensities, you like the result, then you have the option of simply saving that image or sending those changes to the scene, which will update
all your lights/self-illumination values.

I don't use Sketchup but I would guess it is the same interface.
The best way to figure out what it does is just to experiment and then ask if you get stuck on any particular area or parameter