This week’s Monday Movie is about how you can create a light glare effect in your renders both in Photoshop and using mental ray’s “Glare” shader.  I wasn’t sure I’d have this tutorial out in time, but it actually came together pretty well!

The glare effect in 3dsMax is basically the process of looking for super-bright pixels in the rendering and blurring them on their own layer.  You can do this in Photoshop after the render, but it doesn’t take into account the brightness of the pixels (i.e. white and ‘light-emitting are identical).  Thus, by generating a glare layer, you have a lot of control over how your final render looks in 3dsMax.  If you’re working on photo-real work like architectural visualization or product rendering, this is exactly the kind of technique you need in your repertoire!

Also, I’m afraid I haven’t made enough progress on my side project to fully unveil it.  However, I’m looking to create a tutorial collection website that will be the largest, most searchable 3dsMax tutorial database out there!  How do I plan to do this?  Well, you’ll find out!  But the good news is that it’ll have minimal advertisements, ratings, and tons of healthy learning opportunities.  More to follow as it happens.