Note that I’m far from an advanced Rhino user (especially when it comes to rendering). I’ve been playing around some more and may have found some useful tips. I also wouldn’t mind getting some feedback from developers on how to get emission materials to behave more like “lights”. The current solution I found works for a straight light but wouldn’t work for say, a path like a neon light.
I’m using linear lights for the “glow” effect and using physically-based emissions to help visualize where the lights actually are. Using emissions alone seems to not produce the same glow I can get with a light. But when using lights alone there is no way to preview their location. So using both allows me to have the “glow” (from the lights) and the emissions allow me to see where the LED actually exists. I’m using physically-based materials with emissions instead of simply using an emission because the physically-based material allows for both the emission and transparency to exist at the same time; I’m placing the linear lights within the emission objects and therefore, the material transparency gives me an additional control over the intensity of the lights.
I’m still battling a few issues. First being that I wish I could just use emissions via the materials instead of having to combine emissions with lights. Next, I’m wondering about the shadow in the back corner: Would it actually exist? The emissions are casting a shadow but aren’t they also glowing (and therefore would emit light in that direction?); perhaps I’ve overlooked a setting somewhere. Some of the issues I’m having might also be hardware related.
Here’s a screen shot of my settings. Note that I might have had the first light turned off during the render. it’s just a square light on the ceiling. You can also see how the lights look in “realistic” and “rendered” display modes. Overall, the “preview” modes look a lot different than the final render. Overall brightness is also way different. It’s actually really hard to render on a mediocre computer:
This is one of my botched renders for reference. It looked just fine in realistic mode. It looks like someone accidentally split an atom:
And… here’s a clip of the room just for reference:
Apologies if I’m hijacking this thread. I just happen to be attempting something similar to Maria at this time so hopefully it helps out in some way. I still need to work on getting more “glow” effect to look more like Maria’s first image.