How to animate "Glows"?

[Tom]

Hello-

 

In the properties panel you can turn on "Glow" for a group. It seems you can either turn "Glow" "ON" or "OFF".

 

I tried searching the database but couldn't find an answer to the question, "What if you want a "Glow" to grow,... over time?...from nothing to a bright glow...

 

Is there a way to do this without making two different renders...one with the glow "ON" and one with the glow "OFF" ...and then just cross dissolve the renders in another program like AfterFX?

 

Thanks for any insights

 

Tom

[mtpeak2]

In the choreography properties, you can animate the glow radius and glow intensity.

[johnl3d]

simple idea played with colors on object the controls of glow in chor

 

 

 

glowcontrol.mov

 

 

glow.zip

[Darkwing]

In the choreography properties, you can animate the glow radius and glow intensity.

 

 

The real problem will arise the day when someone needs to animate the glow on one object (or portion of the object) in the chor, but not the other...

[johnl3d]

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?act=a...st&id=60509

 

possible solution to " animate the glow on one object (or portion of the object) in the chor, but not the other"

[Rodney]

The real problem will arise the day when someone needs to animate the glow on one object (or portion of the object) in the chor, but not the other...

 

If I'm not mistaken the classic solution to controlling glow is to manipulate/animate the Ambiance settings (Color and/or Intensity) on the specific object you want to effect. Something that is also often overlooked is adjusting the Diffuse setting to a lighter or darker color as that also will alter the effect of Ambiance settings that otherwise remain the same.

 

For those who have never played with the Ambiance settings under Surface properties I highly recommend experimenting there as adjusting these settings can be useful in many ways. For instance, composing a scene without any lights etc.

 

Here is a quickly thrown together render of three copies of the same sphere placed in a Chor with only a few Surface settings changed on each:

(Note: There are no lights in this particular Choreography but I did crank up the Chor's Glow intensity setting to 50% and that is effecting all three spheres accordingly.)

[Rodney]

Here I've added one red light into the Chor and set the Ambiance Intensity of the left-most sphere to 0%:

[Rodney]

I made only one change here. The Group that has the Ambiance settings that controls the surface of the right-most sphere now only contains the Control Points for the top half of the sphere:

[Rodney]

Added a new named Group to the lower half of the sphere with Blue Ambiance set to 50%:

[Rodney]

I don't recall ever playing with Glow and Ambiance Occlusion before but it produced this:

 

Once again keep in mind that these are all the same basic sphere tossed into a common Choreography. Note the variable color to the glow of the center sphere that has produced red on top (due to the red light above) and a greyish glow beneath.

 

Edit: Also added a second rendering of same setup with a few minor tweaks such as Ambiance Occlusion dropped to 1%.

[Rodney]

Something I haven't experimented with a lot but know should be explored when considering Glow is how an object (or scene) is actually lit.

Here is the previous rendering but this time with a really intense white light backlighting the spheres:

 

I suppose the point I'm trying to make here is that we don't want to adjust the Glow in a scene as much as we do the surface properties of the objects and the lighting in the scene. This is one of the reasons we see a lot of pros spend their time setting up a scene with only greyscale colors before going on to color, texture and light a scene. Glow itself tends to be a Global property within any given scene; it is the effect of all the accumulated light available on a specific surface. The surfaces of the objects and the lighting then dictate how we perceive anything in that scene that is glowing. Depending on your specific goals, once you've got everything set up, animate the lighting and surfaces to effect the glow.

 

Hope that makes sense!

 

Edit: It should be noted that we haven't explored Radiosity and Image Based Lighting, HDRI etc. Surfaces that emit light (and glow) are generally a function of Radiosity.

[Tom]

Thanks so much for all the suggestions and examples!

 

I will definitely be playing with this more!

 

Tom

[Rodney]

Tom,

One important thing I forgot to say with regard to lighting with Ambiance is that the Ambiance is cancelled on surfaces that are set to Black (i.e. the Diffuse color is set to Black). In other words the ambiance of a purely black surface is... relatively... 100% black.

 

This often confuses folks because they might set up a surface that is black and wonder why they are seeing no effect.

So a general rule to follow when needing Ambiance is to avoid the color Black (at least 100% Black).

 

The really cool thing about this is that we can use that black color to control the placement and effect of Ambiance. This comes in particularly handy when we are using images to control surface ambiance. This is one of those useful things to know kind of like using Negative Lights to darken areas of a scene that captures our basic intent but is too evenly lit throughout.

 

A too simple example is this sphere that is entirely black with the exception of one patch:

[Darkwing]

Cool stuff Rodney!

[Kamikaze]

Thanks Rodney...good thing to know!

 

Mike C