I have used a simple Tourus and tried to create the halo. I can get a shiny Halo, like it is painted in gold paint or something,… but what I was hoping to achieve is to have it look like it is emanating the light. (Maybe like a bright neon light?)
Not this:
The halo should look like it has its own internal light… if that makes sense?
I have played with all kinds of different settings, but I can’t get the effect I am looking for. I’m betting this is easy, but I lack the fundamental understanding necessary.
It’s not as easy as in (say) lightwave… (which has a “glow” parameter for your materials that hooks into a post process automattically… but if you get comfortable with this bit good renders become MUCH easier!
the short explanation would be to separate any objects that you want to glow and put them in a separate render layer…
then in the compositor you can overlay that render layer which will become our glow over the rest of the image…
you can use blur nodes or whatever to get a nice falloff and then blend with the background in all sorts of ways… alpha over, mix–> additive… mix–> screen, whatever…
the things that complicate the above are what methods you choose to mask the glow layer when it passes behind other objects… (you could enable an object ID pass and use that as a mask… that way you could probably get away with a single renderlayer…
render layers are hard to describe as they;'re a big subject… so rather than paraphrase I’ll link you to the wiki
I’d also consider material nodes with (or if you’re lucky instead of) the above…
if you add a geometry input node and do a dot product of the view and the material normal then you’ll get a nice fresnel (or lambert) style rolloff…
geometry facing the camera will be white, geometry perpendicular will be black… for fine control ofthe falloff you can feed it through a colour ramp sio you can tweak rgba values precisely…
depending on your geometry this may not even need compositing…
Don’t forget to enable ZTransp on the material or you’ll get no alpha…
I tried that. But when I assign the torus to halo, I get a color band that is three times as thick as the tourus. There may be other settings to play with, but I don’t know where to start on it… Do you have suggestions?
You might also look into the ‘emit’ value, that’ll make it significantly brighter while dulling the effects of shadows. But it can also go the wrong way and make things look very cartoony and fake, so be careful.
