Self-Illum Mat with Tran/Refract

A Self-Illumination Material with Transparency/Refraction.

huh? so you want it to be transparent but self illuminated? is that physically possible?

i think there are some volumetric glass materials that might achieve that type of effect, of course vray doesn’t have those. MR, fRender do though.

No - it’s not quite realistic but I don’t read that anywhere in the rules. Let me try to explain myself a little bit better.

I have a cutaway of a petroleum refiner (vertical treater to be specific) that I did for a training video. I have one HDR in the scene - I don’t want any more standard lights as the lighting is just perfect.

What I’d like to do is to highlight (call-out) the separated petro phases within the refiner - such as the gas, water, oil, and sludge. Since the interior of this refiner is rather dark, either I’d have to shine an external light (such as a target spot) into it thereby illuminating other metallic parts that I don’t want illuminated (and I’m not about to screw around with light lister as theres a million parts), or I can use default Max materials which look pretty terrible.

Basically, I’m looking for a way to make a section standout by artifically glowing an object which surrounds something else. It’s an object with a glow- but it’s also transparent. Kind of like a fiber-optically lit semi-frosted day-glo glass.

Hmmm, is this what you’re talking about?

--Jon

whoa no but that’s freakin weird. what the heck is that?

this is the scene I was working on - but I highlighted the interiors (colored) within photoshop:

you could do this in post with Combustion or AE, right?

I mean… render out the material id, node id, coverage, and sub pixel wieght gbuffers and add a 3d glow in combustion. You can even key-frame it.

not that i don’t think you wish is valid, just trying to help you get it done now.