Difficulty making a backlit shader. I am new to Arnold (3ds Max)

[Anonymous]

I have a slot machine that I rendered years ago in mental ray using Max. I am wanting to update it using Arnold, but I can't seem to figure out how to get emissive materials to work for me on this particular shader and make it self illuminating or backlit. Look I am trying to achieve is on the top. The middle 2, are the textures I am working with. The bottom is the Arnold 3D render at the point I am at, not getting the result I want. Any help is appreciated. Any tutorials for this type of thing? I am finding tutorials hard to come by for Arnold as compared to Vray or Redshift. Any suggestions?

[madsd · Accepted solution]

Try this, you use a float value that is multiplied with the map to control the bias from the emission map, this is basically your Watt amplifier.

Attached 2019 scene

[Anonymous]

Thanks so much for the answer and the project file. I am out of sorts when it comes to OSL stuff, coming off of 3ds Max 2016 and mental ray. I was getting close to what I wanted with a transmissive shader but was having to use the Arnold properties modifier and excluding lights, etc. Any place to visit online to learn more about OSL from a newb perspecitive?

[madsd]

Zap has some good starter tutorials, all round.
Here is one. https://youtu.be/tUdDAoiiM48

Else just ask if there is some kind of thing you want to do, and we can try look at it and make a generator that does what you want.

You can for many portions of graf shading, eye ball Unreal 4 and Substance node chains, there are many nodes that share identical functionalities, where some - have custom nodes doing this and that.
With OSL we can write custom nodes to do this and that.

Many of the core functional nodes are completly identical to Arnold nodes.
Arnold works very well together with OSL.