anything glows, what am i doing wrong?

Mistara

been trying everything.  i've seen tutorials get more light out of the anything glows.  

tried upping ray depth and indirect light intensity.

i added white color to diffuse and glow for the overhead lights shader. 
set anything glows light to 'object glow' , tried all the options in the dropdown list.

what did i miss?

Thanks!

Dartanbeck

Here's something that perplexed me the first time I tried AG lights:

Anything Glows lights need to be assigned to a single thing. So if you have three lights, you cannot assign an Anything Glows light to one of them, and then duplicate the result. Instead, you have to give each light a unique name and assign a separate AG light to each of them. I cannot remember, but I think it may even want the "Object" name (from the Object tab) instead of whatever name you give it in the instances tab. But I could be wrong there.

Headwax

What dart said, 

try this, stick a vertex sphere in scene name it something simple like 'one' .

chenge the light emitter object to 'one'

change the range to 400 feet, make it as bright as possible , do a test render, scene should be washed out 

now make the emitter a simple vertex plane with same parameters, call it 'one' , erase first sphere, 

do a test render, should get similar result etc,

Now change the name to something already in your scene that has a unique name, I'm assuming you need the mesh, not the figure name 

i see see in your example you have object glow as the colour emitter, just make it white to start  with and see if it works. 

 

 

ProPose

I'v been playing with the same scene Misty.  For the ceiling lights I used the glow channel in the shader room, a multiply operator set to 1000% and the other value to 100 - 500.  But you need to have indirect lighting enabled in the render settings.  I'm not at my main computer so I can't show a preview.  From your screen shots you are using a color in the glow channel, which is fine but you need to give it some intensity, hence a value of 1000 to start. Anything glows for me is a bit fussy,  syntax is very important, and I considered using that but I believe the ceiling lights are part of the ceiling itself, with a different shading domain.  Anything Glows works best with individual objects

Dartanbeck

Fun:

Insert > Shape Light

Change the shape to oval and use the dimension fields to change the size (rather than using the scale tool) and make the light about the same size as those lights on the ceiling

Position the shape light over one of those lights in the ceiling

Set the falloff to distance squared, set the distance to something like 20ft

Don't place the shape light 'into' the mesh of the ceiling, but just below - so it's not touching any geometry

Now duplicte that shape light and position it to the next light, and repeat for the rest of the lights.

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Don't be afraid to add an extra light or two in the scene to behave as an indirect light source. I know that we're suppose to be 'real' about all of this, but sometimes we just need to get the story across.

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Using this technique, we can get by without the need of "Full Indirect Lighting". Ambient Occlusion works well if you need it. For that, though, you need to use the "Ambient" setting in the Scene settings turned up a bit. Set the value in the AO area of the render engine to something similar to the height of the room, like eight feet.

Instead of using Indirect Lighting, I just use highlight-style lighting to paint out my scenes. Heavy shadows for drama, etc., having fun painting with shadows vs light.

Mistara

okay ready to tackle this again.  trying the 1000% tip, thanks!

evilproducer

Just a reminder, that 1000% thing is to use the actual glow shader to create light when rendering with Indirect Light. Instead of a 1-100 slider in the glow channel, you would use a 1-10000 in the glow channel.

Dartanbeck

evilproducer said:

Just a reminder, that 1000% thing is to use the actual glow shader to create light when rendering with Indirect Light. Instead of a 1-100 slider in the glow channel, you would use a 1-10000 in the glow channel.

Right, and is used "Instead" of using the Anything Glows lights ;)

Mistara

ohh thanks.  didnt realize wasnt using anything glows lights.
 

was tryin to learn how the anything glows works and if i should actually use it 

Dartanbeck

This one and the following post ;)