I’ve been looking at how to make hair particles light up or glow using the node editor
Any ideas? I’d like to include an RGB ramp.
Thanks!
set the material id on the hair material to something crazy, then check and be sure material and object id is checked in scene properties(i think). then in the compositor, add an id mask node(set to the same crazy value) connected to the material id output and blur or use the glow effect node.
im away from my computer, so i cant double check or provide screens.
I should be more clear. I don’t want a graphic filter I want my hair to be an actual light source in my scene.
I presume that you are talking about Cycles. “But, regardless …”
To me, this gets back to the cinematic notion of so-called “practical lights.” These are the objects which appear on-camera which are understood from human experience to be “light sources.” Torches, “light bulbs in glasses of milk,” and so on. For a variety of reasons, it is almost never the case that these practical lights actually contribute illumination to the scene. Instead, the lighting of each shot is contrived so that it is plausible to assume that the light you see really is coming from that torch, that glass of milk or what-have-you.
One of the reasons for this is that the practical light probably can’t add nearly enough light to the scene. But another is technical difficulty and lack-of-control. You can control an off-screen light. You can get the dramatic effect that you want for each particular shot and scene. (And you can freely vary it from shot-setup to shot-setup, as long as you are consistent.) You can make the viewer accept that the light is coming from the hair, without dealing with the possibly-messy bits of actually trying to do it that way. The viewer isn’t going to critique the lighting: he’s going to watch the movie!
There are a variety of things that you can do with compositing. If you can isolate the hair – e.g. with an object-ID pass – then you can manipulate it. You can make it stand out from the image, have a little bit of a “halo” around it and so forth, without indulging in computationally-expensive things during the rendering step. To quote a red Christmas reindeer song: “… you could even say it glowed.” (Whether or not it actually did, “and by-the-way it actually didn’t.”)
“Ingrid, fake it.™”
emission shader, perhaps varied by a noise texture, or the length of the hair, or normal based for a light-sabery effect.
Thank you!
glad i could help.
i assumed you wanted a compositor solution since its in the post processing section. this would have been better suited in the materials section. just a tip for next time.
Ah! My bad. Yes it would have been better suited there. I guess I didn’t pay attention to where I was posting my question. Sorry for the noob move.