Quote - It would be cool to gather threads such as this and have a tutorial section devoted to them.
Can't wait to try these effects!

Like this?

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2722867

I also made a bookmark thread for Lighting, one for hair stuff, and one for texturing/painting.  But I want to redo those and organize them better.

That should certainly be included - any thread that contains useful info of this sort could be put in one section of the tutorial section for easy finding/reference

Quote - That should certainly be included - any thread that contains useful info of this sort could be put in one section of the tutorial section for easy finding/reference

ADP gave me some web space to store the bookmarks on.  I need to do up a web page and organize the other categories (which I'm going to try and do this weekend) so I can add them to the page too. I guess I could upload the link to the tutorials section when I'm done. I'll have to check with the mods to see how I could do that and how it could be done so it would be included in a search of different key words.

With the web space I'll be able to update the bookmarks and keep them organized instead of having to constantly dig up a thread or people having to scroll through a thread to find updates.

That's saved me a job... I was going to offer to do the same thing on my website!

mmm. must bookmark this page, has been here for two years and just now I discover the sollucition to some problems.

Ok, I've been over and over it and I cant get my props to mimic Little_Dragon's examples. They are incredibly impressive but I can't figure out how you do it at all. Can someone give me a step by step please.

OT: Sorry

Seriously, is there a real way to bookmark a good thread like this or just post in it?

That's what the "subscribed" link at the bottom is for :)

Again Thank you.

This is really cool! I've been playing around with it and it has a lot of possibilities.

I have a question though. Is it possible to have an object both 'reflect' the ambient colour of another object and also give off it's own ambient colour to other objects with gather nodes. In other words can an object onto which another is projecting it's ambient colour also project it's own ambient color onto another object or prop.

Picture this - A ball and a square. The ball's ambient colour is set to red and the square has a gather node attached to its ambient colour channel. When you render this the square will show 'reflected red light' from the ball. What I would like to do is set the square's ambient colour to say yellow and have this 'reflected' onto the ball or other props in the scene.

I have tried playing around with a math node to add the gather node with a colour but i'm not having much luck. Can any of the node guru's help out here please? :biggrin:

UA

Pretty cool Robo2010.

urbanarmitage, I'm going to try some things tonight and see.  Soemone like Bagginsbill would probably know right off, but I'm curious enough to do some experiments.

Nice image Robo2010.

Thanks ThrommArcadia. I'd be interested to see how you tackle it if you don't mind sharing. I'm still very much a beginner when it comes to the material nodes but I find it very interesting and challenging.

UA

First, The ambient colour of one object may negate anything seen ont he other.  The reason for this (I suspect) is because "Ambient" is supposed to imitate a glowing effect.  In other words, it is supposed to make an object act like it is illuminated (though in a very weak way as shown by the fact that tricks like this are needed for it to actually illuminate anything other then itself.)

In other words darker colours show the gather effect better then lighter colours.

Another thing to consider is what your raytrace bounces are set at in your Render settings.  I set mine to 4 for the test.

Also, if we set up in the way that Little Dragon showed at the beginning of this thread, there will be no appreciable effect.  The Gather Node plugged into the Ambient Colour seems to only produce Black when the colour is set to anything other then White.  I don't know why this is.

So, to get around this I plugged the Gather Node into Reflection Colour.

Both use the same material setting except in the Diffuse and Ambient Colours.

If you look really close you can see a bit of the grey on the bottom of the ball.  You can clearly see the red of the ball on the floor.

You can see a grey line a bit up from the bottom of the ball.  This is the floor.

I suspect that playing with the settings might allow one to get a stronger effect, specifically is one could increase the strength of the glow.  This is probably done with the RayBias, but I'm not certain off hand.

A more volumous object then a flat plane might create a more obvious effect as well.

This is what I've discovered thus far.  I have to run to work now, but I will revisit this tonight.

Oh, btw, my setting are set to 'inches'.  I know that in many cases your preference settings change what the numbers mean in the material room.  If you are following someone's sample and they are using Metric but you are using Imperial, you won't get the same effect.

I should add that there is a distance between the surface and the reflected colour not because my objects are intersecting but because of how I set my gather node.  I suspect the MaxDist has something to do with this, but again I'll have to play more when I get home.

I look forward to other thoughts on this subject.

It's the RayBias that causes the distance between the glowing surface and the gathered color. Lower the RayBias and the distance will become smaller.

The Gather node is rather well named - it "gathers" light from glowing objects and adds it to the (non-glowing) surface it is connected to.So the Gather node should be plugged into the material that receives the glow, not in the glowing object itself. The faint effect on the plane is probably pure specular.

Remove the Gather node from the red glowing ball, keep the rest.
Add a Gather node to the Ambient input of the floor material, set the Ambient color to white and the Ambient Value to 1.000. Keep the angle at 180 degrees, so the floor will collect ambient light from all objects that are on its front side.
Increasing the number of samples will reduce the graininess of the effect.

Now render again (don't forget to enable raytracing).

I tried it from a different angle and here are my results. I was initially trying to use a math_functions node but I wasn't able to get it to work properly so I switched to a color_math node and I have had some success with that.

My test scene comprises of a ball in the foreground, 2 cones in the middle of the scene, and a taurus with a cone in the center at the back of the scene. All of these are floating above a cloth plane which only has a gather node attached to the ambient channel and the ambient colour set to white.

All of the props have the same setup as you can see above with a color_math node plugged into the ambient colour channel. The node is set to add, value 1 is set to the colour I want the prop to be, and value 2 has a gather node connected to it.

Firstly, obviously the gather node on the cloth plane is picking up all the different colours of the props very nicely excepting for the ball. I have set all the gather node MaxDist parameters to 500 but this has not helped. Only objects that are quite close will pick up the colour of the props and 'reflect' it.

The color_math node is adding the colours together nicely and giving the product of the colour of the prop and the colour 'reflecting' onto it. There are a couple of issues here though. The math_color add on the blue cone is adding green to its blue and getting a teal colour, the gather node on the red cone is picking up the green and its own red and giving yellow, and yet the green taurus gather node is 'reflecting' both the yellow and red cones as yellow. I'm not sure why this is but i'm going to play around a bit more and try and fix this.

All in all i'm happy so far but any input from you guys on improving this would be appreciated! :biggrin:

UA

Quote - I have set all the gather node MaxDist parameters to 500 but this has not helped. Only objects that are quite close will pick up the colour of the props and 'reflect' it.

I had a similar problem. My Max Dist wasn't nearly enough.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2716669

You might want to try a value considerably higher than 500.  Bagginsbill explains it in this thread.

Ahh, thanks for that Acadia! The lady with all the URL's comes to the rescue again! :biggrin:

I've changed the MaxDist to 1000 for all the gather nodes now and at the same time i've been stepping up the samples on the gather nodes. They are sitting on 1000 too now. The graininess is now gone but my render times have gone through the roof!

I'll render out my latest test tomorrow and post it here afterwards.

UA

Interesting stuff urbanarmitage.  I worked way too late tonight and will probably tomorrow, so I might not be able to do anything else for a few days.

I think the colour reflections you are getting are quite natural.  Light works a little differently then the standard pigment colourwheel we all get taught in grade school.  The three primaries for light are Green, Red and Blue as opposed to Yellow, Red and Blue.  Thus when mixed you might get a different reaction the you would expect from something like oil paints.

svdl thanks for some clarification on what the settings do.  I really hope to get to try some stuff soon.

G-night all!

Ok well I had a bit of a problem on my home PC so I haven't posted my latest test render yet. My CPU cooler wasn't doing its job properly and my one core started heating up a bit too much. I got myself a nice aftermarket heatsink and spent last night installing and testing it and i'm running about 12 degrees cooler now under full load.

In my latest render the grainy effect is almost completely gone due to me pushing the samples on the gather nodes up to 1000 each. Unfortunately it has also pushed the render time from a few minutes to around 1.5 hrs but the result is worth it. There are 6 gather nodes in total so the render engine has a lot to calculate.

I have set the MaxDist on the gather nodes to 1000 now but i'm still not getting enough distance between the glowing object and the gather node before the gather node no longer 'sees' it. I'm still playing around a bit with that.

UA

Rendered fairly swiftly on 2ghz dual-core.

The graininess can be eliminated by higher Sample rates.

Quote - Anton's magic fx)

Can anybody point out where I might be able to get this???

Thanks in advance.

TS

Quote - > Quote - Anton's magic fx)

Can anybody point out where I might be able to get this???

Thanks in advance.

TS

http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/-/magik-poseable-conforming?item=724&_m=d

There is a freebie at Daz for it too.  http://free.daz3d.com   It's called "Easy Pose for Magik"

bookmark

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - Anton's magic fx)

Can anybody point out where I might be able to get this???

Thanks in advance.

TS

http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/-/magik-poseable-conforming?item=724&_m=d

There is a freebie at Daz for it too.  http://free.daz3d.com   It's called "Easy Pose for Magik"

Thanks... I will have to wait til next month to get it. Was hoping it was a freebie... :sad:

Thanks anyway.

Quote - There are a million different ways to hook it up, of course, but this is the setup with which I've experimented today. Don't forget to enable raytracing in your render options.

There must be more to it than just these settings.  I applied this to my lightsaber and it just  went black even though the ambiant color is bright red. 

You used a color image instead of just assigning a color so does that make a diffeence?  Are there any other settings elsewhere I am suposed to have activated? 

Are you applying the gather node setup to the lightsaber?

If so, you've got it backwards.

You apply the gather node to the surface that is to be illuminated, not the one that illuminates.

Just to review, the gather node is applied to the surface which will receive the energy glow, not the surface that emits the glow.  If you provide screencaps of your material room setup, we can point out the problem(s) easier.

Okay I get it.  This is a lot of work for what I want to do.  I found this thread that is more to my needs.  http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2791668

You are aware that thread pertains to using P8 and PP 2010 and their use with IDL.  Also, you did not specify which Poser iteration you are using which leads to a bit of confusion when you mentioned P6 shader nodes.

Hope no one thinks badly of me for reviving this old thread (actually the latest post was just last year so notso old)

I´ve read through this several times and have no problem with the gather thing, BUT as far as I can tell noone actually explained the bioluminescense effect, right?

I mean the fresnel-ish effect created by Nalif in the beginning. I don´t mean how to cast ligh onto other objects but how to get the figure to look like a jellyfish..sort of. Glowing edges and transparent/translucesnt in the middle.

Thanks a bunch if someone could just tell me in what end to begin doing that and I can prob learn the rest :D

Yeah, I've scoured this thread over and over in hopes of decoding that secret as well.

But it seems this thread went from "how to creat bioluminescence" to "how to setup a gather node to catch ambient light"

I do hope someone would explain and show a node setup.

having become obsolete with addition of GIVariables, development of gather node deprecated after poser 7, in which it reached its most elegant implementation.  currently no "aura" channel/node in poser, hence necessary to fake it using IDL, lite-emitting channel on glowing surface, and aura on partially transparent conforming (co-normal, shrink-wrap, edge-blend) surface, the latter of which can also serve by itself as glowing ghost/jellyfish if no aura needed.  some of these guys may have done some ghosts/xray pix using this already.

Quote - having become obsolete with addition of GIVariables, development of gather node deprecated after poser 7, in which it reached its most elegant implementation.  currently no "aura" channel/node in poser, hence necessary to fake it using IDL, lite-emitting channel on glowing surface, and aura on partially transparent conforming (co-normal, shrink-wrap, edge-blend) surface, the latter of which can also serve by itself as glowing ghost/jellyfish if no aura needed.  some of these guys may have done some ghosts/xray pix using this already.

huh???

Because one can cause a surface to glow by using the Ambient channels of the Posersurface/root node in Poser 8/Poser Pro 2010, there has been no further development of the Gather Node (since Poser 7).

To make an aura around an object (instead of making the object itself glow), one needs a transparent envelope around the object (which roughly approximates its shape). That object can be made to glow with the ambient channel (and make it cast no shadow). See the discussion in this thread.

lmk

ok, forget everything about the gather node and all that... What we're asking is how to make something translucent and glowy like the creatures early in the thread. I know how to make something glow and make it a light source, just not how to make something look like a "jellyfish".

So, no further mention of the gather node needed, nor wanted in this instance.

BionicRooster this may help you

http://www.runtimedna.com/forum/showthread.php?32342-Olivier-s-Ghost-FX-Tutorial

I've actually got that material preset already made, but have no idea how it would pertain to making those glowy creatures.

If you mean the "glowing aura arround the figure" I think a postwork shoul be the easy way ;-) in Poser

No, I mean like this image from page 2 of this thread:

apparently nalif didn't post a shader tree for the toad, which may have used stefan's bacteria texture in diff, spec, trans channels and/or alt_diff (if P6 had alt_diff).  P6 didn't have the GIVariables (P7 did have 'em), which means nalif hadda use a rim lite on the toad, which is not emitting lite.  send nalif an IM to confirm.

o.k., nalif is gone.  maybe somebody with P6 can post stewer's bacteria shader tree, assuming it's not a copyright violation. he woulda used some nodes that the rest of 'em didn't know about IMVHO.  but the "toonamal frog" above shows IOR=1.0 approx (no edge distortion).

It is that, BionicRooster!

Is that part of your raygun freebie, or something you just created?

That is something I made today and will be uploading here pretty soon. It's a smart-prop for my ray gun :o)