Hi folks.
The only Glow kind of effect tutorials or “how to’s” I can find use the compositor layer, or emission against another surface.
Problem being I want a glow effect for an object in a complex scene without flooding everything with the emission. I guess kind of like an aura type effect. Or a neon light, but not at night.
How would you go about this?
Thanks.
The compositor is the way to go!!
For avoiding your emission to ‘flood’ the scene with light, you can:
-Set the emission strength to something lower (or even 0) for rays that aren’t ‘Camera Ray’.
-Adjust the falloff of the emission so it just illuminates the area around.
-Use specific material/object IDs for each kind of glow you need, and use those passes in the compositor.
If you don’t want to use the compositor, you can for example create a volumetric object with an emission shader, and set it only visible to camera rays.
The material ID’s or the volumetric object sound like the better ideas as Im working on an animation, tweaking the compositor nodes will be time consuming and mind melting!
Can you point me towards ant help on these subjects?
Thanks.
Hi,
volumes take very long to render cleanly, I would not recommend that as you’re working on an animation (a single frame can sometimes bring your machine to its knees already), unless like Secrop said you make it exclusive to camera rays, but then it won’t appear in reflections, won’t actually light the scene, etc (you can always add a lamp in the same place to counter that). Depending on your exact needs, compositing a glow on top of the object is very cheap, very straightforward and can totally do the trick.
Hadrien
Hi. Could you share an example image about what kind of effect you’re looking for?
Are you looking for an effect similar to this? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPXdPnCoW0M
You should use object IDs or material IDs when compositing to isolate the object or material you want to add the glow effect to. Then you can just add glow to that specific object without effecting the rest of the scene, allowing you to have a subtle glow around an emmisive/bright object