How do you create atmospheric GLOW effects using Reality?

K T Ong

(No, I'm not talking about Reality as in the reality we live in. I'm talking about that plugin created by pret-a-3d. :D )

I believe you know what I'm talking about. By using various means, you can make a light source in your rendered scene glow, as in having this aura or haze of brightness around it that gradually fades into the distance. One way to achieve this effect would of course be to use Age of Armour's wonderful Volumetric Camera plugin. Below is a rendered image I did using precisely that, which would also give you fellas a better idea of what I'm talking about. My question here is how you can achieve the same or a similar effect using Reality.

In the old DAZ forums I once saw a post in a thread showing a reality-rendered image of a figure with a lightsaber or something. The glow from the lightsaber was breathtaking, and the creator of the image also explained how s/he did it. (There was a reference to something called 'bloom'.) I meant to bookmark the post for future reference, but unfortunately DAZ took the old forums down.

So could anyone explain to me how to create that nice glow effect using Reality? Huh, pweeeease? (I already know how to turn any surface into a light source in Reality -- and that's all I know for now...)

Skiriki

If you have the thread bookmarked, replace 'forum' in URL with 'forumarchive'.

CypherFOX

Greetings,
Do you mean this:

http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=3308786#3308786

With this image:

http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/postimages/origimage_1_3308786.png ?

-- Morgan

K T Ong

That wasn't the image, but hey, the thread was just the right one! (With all the images gone, though...)

Thanks for the help!

fixmypcmike

To see the image, you currently need to take the bit that starts with postimages and put http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/ in front of it.

cwichura

In Reality, you can convert any material into an emitter by right-clicking it in the materials list and then selecting "convert to light". Then you'll need to adjust its power (usually way down) relative to the overall brightness and other lights in your scene. To get the glow effects, you could try the bloom and/or glare post-processing effects in LuxRender (though if you're going that route, doing them in a proper image editing tool like Photoshop or GIMP would give you more control and be MUCH faster, since LuxRender does not use multi-threading when calculating these effects). Another approach to try is using a fog volume in Reality (your example image above looks like the entire scene is contained in a volumetric as well). Be aware that fog volumes will significantly slow down LuxRender, though.