I think I'm starting to get the hang of this 3DS Max thing

[Asimov]

Hi Chilli,

Haven't had much time to work on this, so I just threw this scene together quickly. Now instead of putting a light behind the material I am making the material itself glow.

I am using an archetectural glass material with a luminance of 120 with a falloff map so that it is brighter in the middle than at the edges. Obviously caustics are turned on for the material.
I haven't had time to do this, but I would make a few materials at various intensities so that the x you are making is brighter in the middle. I am only using one material at the moment.

I have also turned on the camera glare shader in the renderer/Camera shaders. This adds more glow. Also make sure caustics are ticked in global illumination.

I am only using one light in the scene which is a target spot light, at the right distance to light up the background but not cause harsh shadows.

It has been a good while since I have used mentalray so had to go back and remember some of this stuff.

Anyway I have included the max file for you to have a play with. Not sure if it helps you or not.

PS. I didn't make an X shape obviously heh heh, but I think you get the idea. Also on the tomato you could either make it round, or use a gradient from very light red to darker red to create the illusion that the tomato is round. I just used a cylinder in my demo. Also forgot to say that my file is in 3ds max 2015 format.

[chili]

Hi Chilli,

Haven't had much time to work on this, so I just threw this scene together quickly. Now instead of putting a light behind the material I am making the material itself glow.

I am using an archetectural glass material with a luminance of 120 with a falloff map so that it is brighter in the middle than at the edges. Obviously caustics are turned on for the material.
I haven't had time to do this, but I would make a few materials at various intensities so that the x you are making is brighter in the middle. I am only using one material at the moment.

I have also turned on the camera glare shader in the renderer/Camera shaders. This adds more glow. Also make sure caustics are ticked in global illumination.

I am only using one light in the scene which is a target spot light, at the right distance to light up the background but not cause harsh shadows.

It has been a good while since I have used mentalray so had to go back and remember some of this stuff.

Anyway I have included the max file for you to have a play with. Not sure if it helps you or not.

PS. I didn't make an X shape obviously heh heh, but I think you get the idea. Also on the tomato you could either make it round, or use a gradient from very light red to darker red to create the illusion that the tomato is round. I just used a cylinder in my demo. Also forgot to say that my file is in 3ds max 2015 format.

Hey asimov, thanks for your tips.

The glare looks nice, it was one of the things I wanted to try out. Need to figure out how to configure 'camera shaders' though. Using maps is something I hadn't thought of, could be nice.

I did consider self illumination, but I gave up on it because self illuminating object can't generate caustic photons. Maybe I don't really want caustics though, come to think of it...

I'll take a look at the source file in detail and see what i can glean.

Thanks again for your help Asimov!

[Asimov]

Hi Chilli,

When a light passes through a piece of coloured glass onto white paper you see the colour of the glass shining through onto that white paper. That is what the caustics are doing. However I believe what you are trying to achieve is a transparent material with a glow, so caustics will help a little, and I am using caustics, but it is not necessarily needed.

If you need to tweak the camera shader settings you can actually go into the renderer and drag the camera shader to your materials as an instance and you have some control of the output of the camera shader. Just remember the camera shader is a post processing effect so you will never see it until the end of the render. Also the camera shader is applied to the whole image and not just the material with the glow, but most of the time this isn't a problem if no other materials need to glow.

[chili]

Yeah, in mental ray 'glowing' materials don't generate caustic photons, so the caustics has no effect here. They can illuminate via final gather though. Still, I'm thinking that caustics are more trouble than their worth here, so self illumination might be what I go for.