Sorry about being so specific, but I need to basically find a way to make certain objects have a glow effect. Like you know, if you use the nodes there is a blur node, or if you don’t, then a glow like basically having a blurry effect around the object to make it look like it’s glowing.
I basically need a way to do that in the regular blender render, and without using nodes. I know there are tutorials about doing it with nodes, but I am horribly bad with nodes. I can not ever seem to use them properly
Something that I tried was just adding a cube and giving it a material, and instead of surface, I clicked halo. I guess that is as far as I have come to try and make a glow effect. But the render of that thing is nowhere close to what I want
It’s actually quite easy using the material pass and some compositing nodes: I’ve posted a blend file to show you what you need to do Set the material to shadeless, and also set the Pass Index under Options on the Material tab to something other than 0
in the render layers, enable ‘material index’ as on of the render passes it’s going to send to the compositor, then in the compositor, it will show up in the renderlayers node. Any object with that material will now show up in this way, and you can use the nodes to tailor the glow how you want it. You can use multiple material index settings, for example to have a red and a blue glow on different objects, in this case you need to use the ‘ID Mask’ node to pull out whichever material ID you have assigned to each material.
I really want to thank you haha. I had done a lot of tutorials about understanding compositing, and to this day, none of them have have any effect on me. Well, maybe a teeeeny tiny bit. I think I know like .0000005% about it. But from that information, and your tips, I was able to do this:
I made a bunch of things and made them all freaking glow. I MADE THEM GLOW! I DID COMPOSITING OMGOMGOMG!!! And even did them individually. like holy crap! I still don’t understand why I put the strings into what I did, but it works:D
Here is the screenshot of the whole tree thing:
I’m really freaking excited right now haha
EDIT: Why did you say to make the objects shadeless btw? I don’t understand that part
EDIT2: I just noticed that you put your first node into the fac of the mix node, and I didn’t. But mine still worked o.O Great, compositing’s confusing part is back
EDIT3: Any way to fix the all black background after making the glowy compositing stuff ? I would like it to be a different color.
if you set it to shadeless then the whole object will show up in whatever color you set it at, no matter what amount of light is reaching it. Think of a flourescent light, the whole surface of the light glows with the same color (more or less), this way your glowing objects will behave in the same way.
If you want to composite the glow over the original render, then you have to use the node setup like in my example, set the mix node to mix or add, I put the blurred material channel into the FAC input of the mix node, this is what blends between the original render and the overlay color (which you set in the color swatch of the mix node)
Thanks a lot nodelete! That really helps. And I learned a lot from your comments. I do, however, have another question that someone might be able to help me with.
Not too sure where to ask it either becuse it involves multiple different things.
I added a texture to a mesh, and when I applied the node blurry business, it didn’t really work. Is it not possible to add the blur effect to mesh that have a UV mapped texture on them?
Oh, so you want to have part of a texture glow? like for example, a checkered floor where the white tiles glow and the dark ones didn’t? Hmm… that would have to be something I’d have to experiment with, best thing is to play around with the node editor and material passes, put your object on it’s own layer, setup a render layer to only render that layer, then in the node compositor use a threshold or something to bring out the part you want to glow.
Hmm, well, I think that could be useful for me later on. I will experiment with that. But what I meant to say was to literally make a object with a texture glow. For example, I have a cube, and I apply a texture on it with each side a different color. And now, I want the whole cube to glow.
I used the exact same method for glowing like I showed you before, and for some reason, nothing seemed to happen.
EDIT: I tried something, and it works nice. But the problem is, the whole cube loses its texture and goes completely white. The texture just goes away
