I generally use an emitter material when I need the glowing effect.

Unless you've got a whole lot of these lights, I've always had the best luck (and most efficient use of time) doing the glows/blurs/fogs in photoshop!

I use a vray light material, it´ll appear as completely white in the material slot, once applied, it´ll give the object a bright color as if the light were on (incandescent), but it has no light falloff or anything like that..

you could simulate the effect.

imagine a fixture within a fixture. tube within tube. your outer geometry is literally a shell... with a frosted glass material. rough up the refraction (scatter light across surface by turning refrac. glossies down a bit, 0.60 to 0.75?), and balance this out with the inner tube that has the vray light material.


nice glow effects without intense render times can be achieved this way.
for large quantities... keep the material subdivisions low

True glow is not possible in V-Ray. This would require that the emitter illuminate the air around it.

So to answer your question, unless there are objects to receive the light, you will always see a crisp outline to your light or emitter object. If this is the case, use Photoshop to make free-standing objects glow.

hit photoshop and pretend you are this guy

.... and I generally do an 'outer glow' in photoshop afterwards.

But check out the 'volume lights' in fry render!

haha. bob ross! i love it.

thanks for the tips everyone.

while u guys at it, i'm thinking to try vray for rendering instead of mental ray. so what platform do u use?? rhino or 3dmax?? or it doesn't matter...

i'm thinking to use 3dmax cos is popular in asia, but at the same time would like to try out rhino the new toy.

I use V-Ray with Rhino. I can't imagine modeling in any other program (I have used a few...) right now, so to have it render as well is nice.

ok, may be i'll try it with rhino... any good tuturials on vray at rhino?? is it difficult to pick it up?? thx.

rhino for models yes. for vray? I'm curious how you handle material mapping. Are there some type of UVW mapping modifiers? how well does it handle this? Also, creating complex materials such as composites (i.e...brick composite: where brick is one diffuse map, mortar is another diffuse map, all sharing a bump)

i'd love to skip the max import process.

Vray for Rhino 4 has much improved material mapping. It has bump, displacement, background, GI, reflecion, and refraction per material or per object. Plus 2 sided materials, physical sun, sky and camera and a gamma corrected workflow. Vray for Rhino 4 comes pretty close to a one button setup now.

Rhino 4 also allows for per object mesh settings which will save you plenty of hassle when it comes time to render those curvy shapes quickly.

The texture mapping can take a little bit to get the hang of, but once that's mastered its pretty sweet.

so the short answer DEV is yes, vray for Rhino can handle complex materials and handles UVW mapping quite well.