Making things glow

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Hello,

So can anyone suggest some methods of making geometry glow when rendered? For example if I wanted to do a magical effect, and have a nice particle system glow different magical colours..or something..

I'm thinking this sort of thing might be easier to achieve in 2D, duplicating a sharp render and blurring it etc then compositing it over the original render etc. to make a glow. Although I have a suspicion that if I find a way to make stuff glow nicely in the render I might have more control over the look.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!
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This question comes up frequently.

The general consensus answer is to do it in comp as it is a “lens” effect. It offers you the most control. Just search the SESI and OdForce forums for more info.

The only motivating factor for doing in render is if the glow was a bloom effect in a local atmosphere to the object that is emitting light. If that is the effect you want to achieve, then surround your object with volume data and render it that way.

Attachments:
glowing_teapot.hip (715.6 KB)

There's at least one school like the old school!
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Hey Jeff,

Thanks for replying and for the hip file.

I seem to be having trouble getting it to render. I am using 11.0.469 and I get the following error in my shell:-

mantra: Error loading geometry /obj/platonic_object1/switch1 from stdin

I tried the scene in a different build of H11 also (11.0.406), but I get the same error. I've had this before with H11 in scenes where the isoOffset sop is used. Is anyone aware if there is a bug?
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Grab the latest. Works fine in 527. 504 is the latest production build, I'm sure it works fine in that.

Cheers,

J.C.
John Coldrick
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old_school
This question comes up frequently.

The general consensus answer is to do it in comp as it is a “lens” effect. It offers you the most control. Just search the SESI and OdForce forums for more info.

The only motivating factor for doing in render is if the glow was a bloom effect in a local atmosphere to the object that is emitting light. If that is the effect you want to achieve, then surround your object with volume data and render it that way.


Do you have a modern answer for this in 2019?
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It's no different now. Do the glow in post, or make a volume that surrounds your object and light/render that volume with the object.
MOPs (Motion Operators for Houdini): http://www.motionoperators.com [www.motionoperators.com]
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