Video Post - GlowIn this tutorial we will create our next effects using 3DS Max's built in Video Post effects.

Glow.

To start, lets open a new 3DS Max scene and create a camera out of our Perspective viewport, by hitting " Ctrl + C " with the Perspective view highlighted.

It should immediately turn your view from Perspective to Camera 01, like below. Once your camera is created, you can hit "Shift + f" on your keyboard to turn on your safe frames.

Since we are going to make something glow, we need to add an object to our scene.

Go to the create tab, and drag a sphere out in the top viewport of your scene.

Select your sphere, and then right click to bring up the right click menu and go to Object Properties.

It will take you to the all important Object Properties Dialogue window.

We are concerned with the Object ID: setting in this window. We want to give our sphere an ID number so that Video Post can then make only it glow in our scene. It doesn't matter what number you choose, just make sure you remember it. I have chosen 26 for our purposes here. Once you have given it a number, click OK.

Next, go up to the top of your screen to the Rendering menu, and then down to Video Post... like below.

It will open up a new dialogue window which is the central hub for your Video Post effects that looks like this:

Remember how to get here, because this is where we will put all of our video post effects. It is called video post for a simple enough reason, all the effects are added to the video AFTER the scene renders, or Post scene.

Inside this window you will have access to several new buttons, we are going to focus on 3 of them to start out.

The first is the "Add Scene Event" button. It is the one that looks like a little blue teapot with an arrow on its way down and toward it. I have marked it with a red border below.

Click the Add Scene Event button and bring up the next dialogue window. This is where you will tell Video Post what camera or view to use in your final render. The dialogue looks like this:

For now we are only concerned with the Drop Down menu near the top of the window. This is where you tell Video Post which camera to use in creating the stars. Make sure to select the camera we made out of our perspective view when we first opened up 3DS Max. It should probably still be default named at Camera01.

You can also set things up like Scene Motion Blur, Start and Stop of your animation, as well as when to start and stop your Video Post effects should it differ from your actual scene time.

For now, just make sure you have the correct camera selected and hit OK. It should add an Icon to your main Video Post window Queue like below.

The next button we will need is the" Add Image Filter Event" button, which looks like a yellow rectangle with a wavy line drawn through it.

Click the Add Image Filter Event, and bring up our next dialogue window which looks like this:

In the Drop Down list, where we previously added a Starfield, we are going to add a Lens Effect: Glow.

Once the glow is in the drop down, click OK. We'll come back and alter the settings in a minute.

Then click the Add Image Output Event button.

Click on the Files button, and name your event Glow, and save it as a JPEG file, with Best quality. Then hit OK twice to return to the main window with all 3 of our events in the Video Post window. It should look like this.

Now double click on the Lens Effects Glow in your Queue, this should bring up your glow settings dialogue again.

Click on Setup...

The Glow Dialogue settings window will appear. The first thing we notice is that there is a large empty black box taking up the upper portion of our window.

This is the preview window, it can display a generic preview of your glow effect by clicking the Preview button in the lower left hand corner, or it can display a smaller version of your actual scene by clicking VP Queue and then Preview.

Now save your work before moving on at all.

This will only work if you have all 3 of our events in the main VP window, which is why we came back to the settings for the glow.

With both buttons pressed it will look like this. VP Queue and Preview are depressed, but nothing is shown yet.

This is because we have not told Video Post what to display a glow on. Remember back when we went into our Sphere's object properties and gave it an Object ID number that I told you to remember? This is where we will need it. I gave mine the number 26, and so in the settings under the "Source" area, we see a check marked box labeled Object ID. This is defaulted with the number 1 in it, let's change it to 26 to match what we assigned our sphere and hit enter.

If all goes well, 3DS will render a quick preview of your scene in the preview window with the added glow effect in its current settings displayed for you. I should bring up, that Video Post has some rather nasty bugs when it comes to previewing these things and if you are like me, half the time you will wait on the Rendering MAX scene. Please stand by. window forever and then it will crash. The work around is simply don't use the Preview. Instead, adjust your settings, and then hit OK and use the render button in video post to check and see if it worked well for you.

Once the Object ID is the same in the Glow settings as it is in your Object properties, it is all a matter of experimenting with the various settings of the Glow. On the properties tab, in the Filter area you can tell the glow to surround all of the object, just around the outer edges, perimeters , brightness, or hue.

The next tab over is the Preferences tab.

Here you will find things like the Effect settings area with the Size of your glow and the Color area that will let you define the glow as a gradient, pixel, or user selected color, as well as the Intensity of the glow.

In the next tab, the Gradients Tab:

You can define custom gradients to be used by your glow in defining it's look and feel.

The last tab, is the Inferno tab.

Here you can define whether your glow takes on different proporties such as that of gaseous, Fire, or electricity. You can define the size of the sparks and flames, their speed and movement, quality, and direction.

The only way to learn about all the settings is to experiment with them until you get the look you are after.

I will detail a few of the ways you can customize the glow at the end of this tutorial.

Once you have made your choices, hit the OK button to take you back to the main Video Post window.

Now all that is left to do is render out your animation and see if the results are satisfactory.

Click the Video Post render button, which is the little running stick figure on the top row. Choose your size, animation length, etc. and render away.

Here are a few ways you can combine settings in the VP Glow effect dialogue.

This gaseous glow effect uses the All selection in the first tab, in the second tab a size of 5, and the choice of Gradient. In the gradients tab, we changed the top gradients colors to yellow and green. Then in the Inferno tab we used Gaseous and marked all three color boxes Red, Green, and Blue.

This one used the same settings as the first, only instead of Gaseous we changed it to Electricity, and changed the gradient from a white to blue color. We also changed the size in the Inferno tab to 20.

This one was changed to a yellow orange to red gradient, and changed to the Fiery selection on the Inferno tab. Also made the size on the preferences tab to 10.

And the good old fashioned normal glow. We turned off the 3 color boxes on the Inferno tab so Red, Green, and Blue were not check marked. On the preferences tab, we chose Pixel instead of gradient and changed the size to 5.

Do some of your own experimentation, and see what results you can get.