Glow brightness... Greater than 1?

[BJMonkey]

Is there a way to make light glows higher than 1?

This is actually something I've wanted for a long time... But never thought to ask.

This would be very useful for reflections, and I assume possible now that HDRIs are useable, and there for reflecting a value of more than 1.

High values of glow brightness would allow more realism in objects with low reflection values.

[Ian]

Hi BJMonkey,

Can't you do this in the glow layer settings?

Best,

Ian

[BJMonkey]

Ah, sorry.

I mean for lights with glow... The round glow you get with spot lights.

Do you mean with object glows? Are they reflectable?

At the moment if you have a light with full glow and you want to reflect it (to get a nicer looking specular) unless the object has pretty high reflect settings (which will obviously reflect everything other than the glow as well, more than I'd like), the glow's reflection looks pretty dull.

I'll make a mock-up when I can find my dongle... Stupid thing.

[scott8933]

Its been a while, but can't you augment the glow using the "fog" on top of it? There's an additive setting as I recall.

And if that doesn't work, you could just place two lights in the same place. Or just do it the really old way, and place a sphere in there with a falloff shader on it to simulate the whole thing.

Ah, sorry.

I mean for lights with glow... The round glow you get with spot lights.

Do you mean with object glows? Are they reflectable?

At the moment if you have a light with full glow and you want to reflect it (to get a nicer looking specular) unless the object has pretty high reflect settings (which will obviously reflect everything other than the glow as well, more than I'd like), the glow's reflection looks pretty dull.

I'll make a mock-up when I can find my dongle... Stupid thing.

[BJMonkey]

Or just do it the really old way, and place a sphere in there with a falloff shader on it to simulate the whole thing.

But luminance can't go above 1 either, so would that allow for bright reflections?

I want to be able to, for example, set reflectivity to 0.1, and have a bright white reflection from the light... As you can get using HDRI reflections.

(Can't find my dongle, and I've been too busy to do a through search... I really hope we can have software keys sometime...)

[Ian]

Values higher then 1 would be good, you're right about that, I do my glow in post though, I suppose you can render out to layers and just stack the glow layer up...

Ian

[scott8933]

Your max reflection would be a 100% white area no matter what, so you'd have to fake it with glows/bleeds/halos/etc. AKA, the screen only goes that bright - so a reflection can never be brighter except by using an optical illusion trick.

I think what you're asking is this - you want an object that's not very reflective, but there's a really really bright thing in there to create a hotspot on said object. Without actually testing this, a couple solutions come to mind:

-You could make several reflection-only objects, all 100% luminous, and hope they somehow add to each other (probably won't work)

-You could texture-map a fake reflection onto the object instead.

-You could put a second object in the same place as the "real" one, and set it to be 100% transparent except for the reflection you want to use.

-You could do the same thing, except render the extra reflection object as a second pass and composite it in AE. That would offer the most control since then you could add glows and whatever on top of it without effecting the rest of the scene.

But luminance can't go above 1 either, so would that allow for bright reflections?

I want to be able to, for example, set reflectivity to 0.1, and have a bright white reflection from the light... As you can get using HDRI reflections.

(Can't find my dongle, and I've been too busy to do a through search... I really hope we can have software keys sometime...)