How To Make a Light Bulb Glow
Fauvist
Posts: 2,048
In Poser, how do you make a model of a lightbulb, which is visible in the scene, glow? I know how to make a point light create a glow, but I don't know how to make the lightbulb itself look as if it is creating the glow. - my example image of the lightbulb is in the public domain on wikipedia - here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Livermore_Centennial_Light_Bulb.jpg
lightbulb.png
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Post edited by Fauvist on
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The usual way is to use Ambient Color, but it depends on the lightbulb's materials. Some of the models I've made have separate materials for glass, filament, etc, so it's fairly easy to control the different elements. If its just a bulb with a single glass material, you can make use Ambient and Opacity to get a 'pearl' bulb effect. Go for a warm orange Ambient Color.
mac
You can also, I am told, use Area Light on the filament but I am told that this may not be sufficient to cast light as far as need be and so an additional pinlight may need to be added.
Poser doesn't have area lights. Aren't those lights used in programs like 3DS Max?
Poser doesn't have area lights. Aren't those lights used in programs like 3DS Max?Also in DAZ Studio. :)
Although, that doesn't help the OP much. Working with the Ambient channel is probably the best way to go for Poser right now.
Yea Ambient is the way to go. I know it works in DS. Ambient is one of those surfaces that is very glowy so if you were to do a dark scene but had, say skin, set with too much Ambient, it would have an unnatural glow to it. SO I imagine that applying that to a light bulb or the filament inside of the bulb (if the artist bothered to include that, would cause it to glow.
Thanks for the information! With "ambient" in Poser - how do I make a surface of an object abient? Is there a setting somewhere to specifiy which object to make glow, and the intensity of the glow?
You know, I'd use DAZ studio, but I have so much trouble moving figures back and forth from Poser to Daz that it makes it not worth it. I make a figure in DAZ Studio with Genesis and a bunch of 4th generation morphs and add skin texture, then move it to Poser and pose it with fabric and then move it back to DAZ Studio and the skin texture is out of alignment - and I know there's some solution to this, but when I try to fix it - I can't figure out how to do it.
Well that's the problem with both programs. Their surface settings are very different at render time. Poser uses a gray scale for Displacement but DS uses a black & white with slight gray blurs for Displacement. I'm not sure how Ambient plays between both programs though. It's been forever that I've done a serious render in Poser.
You might also try applying a probe light to the filament surface. I've use those to make, for example, runes glow. Of course, the object you're trying to make glow needs its own material zone, but I'm assuming you already have that covered....
I'm really struggling with this because it is a "pet peeve" of mine to call Ambient the "glow" of a surface. See my blog entry Diffuse, Ambient and Specular for more information about what I mean. Poser users and content artists have used the Ambient surface channel for glowing effects for years, however, so this is "tried and true" advice that Maclean started. :)
Two things to keep in mind ... using the Ambient surface settings does not actually make the surface glow. The surface appears to be glowing because the rendering engine is adding color to the surface even when there are no lights in the scene shining on it. However, it will not emit light on to the other objects in your scene. You'll still need a point light located inside the light bulb if you want the bulb to cast light/shadows on your scene. If you do that, make sure the surface of the light bulb is also set to NOT cast any shadows.
Second (mostly for others reading this), this trick works less well in DAZ Studio. The reason is that in the default shader for DS, the Ambient and Diffuse channels are linked together. This is by design and conforms to Pixar's Renderman reference shaders. However it can cause some confusion when people bring content into DS using Poser material settings since Ambient doesn't work quite the same way. The good news is that DS users can apply an Area Light shader to the light bulb surface that actually makes the object emit light. :)
Disclaimer: I have never used Poser
However, if you look in the materials room you should see the ambient properties for the surface. You can either set it to a static colour or attach an image map to it. Check any SciFi environment sets you have, or things with candles/flames (such as from DM environment sets) for examples of how they've configured ambient in Poser.
With regards to your back and forth, are you only going to Poser just to get a cloth drape done? If so, why not pose the figure first in Studio, send the posed figure over, drape it, and then import only the frozen drape back into Studio? It's still a bunch of work, but less things to go wrong that way.
Go to the Material Room (why are they called 'Rooms', anyway; that makes absolutely no sense!), and select the 'Advanced' tab. Use the 'Object:' and 'Material:' drop-downs to locate the filament surface material. Then look for 'Ambient_Color' and 'Ambient_Value' (they're, like, the seventh and eighth items on the 'Poser Surface' panel); those are the items you want to play with. Pick your color (a nice, warm, pale-yellowish, as maclean suggested), and dial up the value. Render. Tweak. Re-render. Repeat as necessary. (And I challenge you not to start sounding like Scooby-Doo while you're doing it!)