Glowing items in Daz

Jenkins3D

What is the best way to get glowing objects in both 3Delight and Iray that you can control the strength of the light? Shaders are fine but just hoping to get an easy fix for it.

 

thanks!

mjc1016

For 3Delight, without shaders, you can't and even with them, most just fake it. The standard Studio shaders only provide a 'fake'. 

 

In Iray, you need to set emissive property of the surface to 'on'.  You do this by setting the emissive color to a color other than black.

sriesch

In 3Delight, you can fake it with ambient (it won't actually emit light or light up other objects, but it will appear lit, which works for certain things), or you can use UberAreaLight to actually make a light-emitting surface:
    To make a surface emit light, select the surface, then select "!UberAreaLight Base.dsa".  Then, in the Surfaces pane:
    To see the light source itself, set "Ambient Active" to On, and set the Ambient color, and apply an image to the Ambient Color if you want the light to have surface features.
    To change the color of the light emitted, set Color .  
    Change the Intensity slider up to make it brighter; note some lights may need to be dramatically brighter to be seen, work with powers of 10 to start with.  Opacity can also be used at the same time.
    To fix any graininess, especially in shadows: increase the samples parameter (at the cost of greatly increased render time).  The value varies greatly depending on the light.  I have seen 32 work for some lights, 1024 was needed for one.
    TODO Falloff Active was somehow set to Off, although my notes indicate it defaults to on.  see what happens on a fresh installation, do I need to adjust it to "on" the first time?

Note that this will significantly increase render times, and may require some experimentation to get right since it's a bit tricky to find the correct intensity.  If you pick a value that's too small, it may look like nothing's happening, and of course too large will wash out, and you have to worry about adjusting grainy shadows.  Definitely worth the effort to learn though.

V3Digitimes

For Iray and 3Delight, it is going to be very different.

The simplest is for 3Delight : you can use shaders or shaders + linear point lights. The shaders are not included by defaul but can be buit in the shader mixer. That is what I did here for instance: http://www.daz3d.com/soldiers-of-magic-serpio .Or you can use uber light as sriesch mentionned but the result looks often more "emissive" than "glowy" (otherwise I wouldn't have developed a shader..).

For Iray, things go more complex. You have to set up an emissive shader, eventually (or not) add lights, but the glowing result will depend a lot of the render settings (bloom effects) and will also be better if you add a volume cube around your scene (but in front of the camera). The issue is that render times become long then. But this can be done, even if it is much more difficult than in 3delight.