Rendering a filament

May 20, 2005 2 Replies
M

I've been playing with various approaches to rendering self-luminous portions of models. The first attempt was a simple cylinder, as in a straight fluorescent tube. I can't say that I got satisfactory results with PW.



A more generalized statement of the problem (and possibly an order of magnitude in complexity) would be to render a lightbulb with the filament glowing. The filament could be the only light source in the image being rendered.



Yet another application I know I'll have might require rendering LED lights shining through various materials. Again, each and every LED has to be a light source.



My gut feeling is that this is way beyond what SW+PW can be expected to do. I read a new thread about an Alias product that looks interesting. Is it time to consider an external solution?



Any ideas/pointers/thoughs in either direction?



Thanks,


-Martin


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R

I haven't really done lights or light filaments but there has been discussion here at various times on how to achieve this. A search may pull up some info. Some people had some very believable ways of doing this. If I rember correctly they set there filamnet to a constant material setting (in PW) and then switched on Indirect Illumination. The short explination, any material set to constant with Indirect illumination will actually work (glow) light a light source. If you add a little bit of light to the rendering the constant materials will look illuminated. I beleive one technique is to have a tube (your light) and use the constant material setting as described above. Then place a point light inside the tube at a low light setting. The combination of the ID, material and point light will cause the entire tube to glow like a light. Not sure I'm much help. If I get some time I ll play with it.

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Z

Here's the thread on what Milke Wilson modeled/rendered...

formatting link
(Indirect Illumination Test Image)

..

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