I do have a text I wish to let light, but the text should light only on the outlines. (stroke)
I would like to know if this is possible without using multi/object materials and selecting faces on the mesh. hmmm, so if it’s possible to do something like this just with a vray material ?
Make the text from a max text shape with a mesh select on it to make the solid fill surface. Then make a copy of it, delete the mesh select and turn on renderable for the spline. Make the radius as thick as the thickness of the neon tubing you want to make and apply a vray light material to it so it emits light. Personally I use a falloff in the map slot of the vray light material so I can get a bit of variation between the edge and center of the tubing. you’ll need to enable gi to get this to work and if your tubing is very thin, you’ll probably need a high multiplier to get enough light coming out to be effective.
Create the outside shape and make a vraylight material and apply it to it for the material. As mentioned, turn on gi, and bump it a few times to get it to emit some good light.
Yup - you could also make the mesh into an epoly object, go into border mode and select everything - detach a copy of the edges as a shape and you’ve got the splines automatically.
Make it an editable mesh, then select all edges, use the auto edge visible tool, adjust the settings, it should hide all the edges that are not a border. Convert to EPoly, then select borders.