Recently I’ve been working on a node setup which makes the brightest parts of the scene glow.
I think I achieved pretty good results on this. The good thing about it is that it makes the sky glow (classic interior scene where light comes from a Window) and the emitters!
The size of the glow is connected to the material’s Emit Value.
Example: 0.5 Will glow just little or maybe not.
1.0 Will glow a bit stronger
1.5 - 2.0 will glow all around
As well as that it also makes bright objects glow (the brightest parts). The glow as well depends on the material’s color.
Also you can change the power and the color of the glow trough RGB Curves.
Here’s the node setup:
And here’s a test scene:
Ok, so the .blend is attached, feel free to play around with it.
Your node setup is nice, but it’s… inefficient. It’s just a lot bigger than necessary. I took the liberty of making a comparison setup that achieves similar results with less than half the nodes, I also made another test scene for easier comparison. Which, actually, shows another weakness of your setup. It’s so tuned to that particular scene that when it’s used with another scene it simply… Doesn’t do anything.
Here is my result using your scene:
And here is my result with the scene I made:
And the .blend. Your scene is on layer two, mine is on layer one. Both node setups are also in there.
Thanks for your crit. I now realized that half of my nodes weren’t necessary:o.
But I took some time to look at your nodes. By my opinion you are missing the main control over to what to blur exactly. Right now it seems to blur just everything out. I modified it at bit. Added the ColorRamp which controls what to blur out, And a Math Value to control the brightness of the actual glow. And because there are no Burn nodes (like in mine), it actually blurs out anything bright.
I added another scene with a emitter sphere. It’s on layer 3.
The .blend is attached. (You have to modify the Math Value for each scene layer)
The only thing I really noticed is that the first RGB curve is nearly useless, you can adjust it as much as you want and it only makes the most infinitesimal difference.
The other thing to be careful of is that when you delete the background plane, there’s nothing to composite the blur over except the black background, and you could have some issues compositing the blur over something else properlyif you tried to incorporate it into a scene. I don’t think that would be a problem with this particular setup, but it’s just something to keep in mind.
The only thing I really noticed is that the first RGB curve is nearly useless, you can adjust it as much as you want and it only makes the most infinitesimal difference.
The other thing to be careful of is that when you delete the background plane, there’s nothing to composite the blur over except the black background, and you could have some issues compositing the blur over something else properlyif you tried to incorporate it into a scene. I don’t think that would be a problem with this particular setup, but it’s just something to keep in mind.
Thanks, and yes the first RGB node is there for almost no reason (or maybe for the finest detail).
And for the plane, i deleted it only in the end of my process (I didn’t like the gray), so not to worry about that. Nevertheless I completely agree with you.
Thanks for posting your setup. I like this approach. I’ve played with nodes and glow effects before, but was having trouble preventing the the nodes from affecting the whole scene.
