Creating day-glow (fluorescent) materials?

[Kevin Thorp]

Does anyone know how to create day-glow colors in the material editor? Specifically fluorescent orange.

Our orange material looks dull, but when we add a little self-illumination it still doesn't look realistic.

[MadeAtMidnight]

OOOH, this is one that I can answer !

http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tut...Hologram/18856

We were going to use it for our animation, then switched ideas.

Hope this helps

[Sunny Sharma]

There are two ways. Follow that video post tutorial, or use post-processing (After Effects, Final Cut) to create a soft glow add blended video layer.

I'd go with the post-processing, because in video post you also have to constantly render through video post and set that up. Plus it isn't as controllable in art-style. You are limited to what 3ds Max gives you. Then again you are limited to what the video app gives you as well. All depends on what you are aiming for.

[BuddyB309]

Originally Posted by MadeAtMidnight

OOOH, this is one that I can answer !

http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tut...Hologram/18856

We were going to use it for our animation, then switched ideas.

Hope this helps

Go! Carrie! I'm glad to see your making great strides.

To be on the safe side. So you don't get disquailified, I would use combustion instead of after effects

[MadeAtMidnight]

[quote=BuddyB309;684056]Go! Carrie! I'm glad to see your making great strides.

Maybe old dogs CAN learn new tricks

[pyr0b0y]

try using afterburn atmosphere effect "glow", u can model suns, and make light saber like glows

[Efalunt]

A Lens effect Glow might work:

Look at the 'Blade Material' part of this tutorial
http://www.oman3d.com/tutorials/3ds/...ber_fadi/2.php

You can tweak the parameters as needed. It works pretty well for non-lightsaber objects too (I used it on a hoverboard I modeled for a game the other day)

[jacob07]

and here i am thinking that this thread was about making your actual robot fluorescent....

[Kevin Thorp]

Thanks for all the great tips but I wasn't looking for a material that actually glowed. I meant "day-glo" as in extremely bright colors

Specifically we're trying to replicate the look of a fluorescent orange plastic whistle. In the "real world" it's even brighter than it looks in this photo:

http://www.fish4fun.com/images/Produ...valWhistle.jpg

Our orange material seems a bit muddy by comparison. How can we make the plastic bright, but not have it look like a light?

[BuddyB309]

Ah now this is where layer rendering comes in handy. Render out your diffuse and lighting pass and save it as a video file. Now strip the materials off of the model and make it pure black with raytrace turned all the way up. The only thing it should be reflecting is a white box with self illumination turned all the way up. Now use that layer as an alpha channel in Combustion and set the glow of that layer, or just gausian blur it. And bingo!! light!

What your seeing there is not a specular in the picture, your seeing the reflection of the light source off of the plastic.