Flexible Arnold Light And Shader Glow, Glare And Bloom Effects

[MoNaYLeviathan]

Arnold should definitely have some type of features for glow, glare and bloom effects in Maya.  It is a highly useful and necessary feature for many projects and can speed up work vastly, but unfortunately there is no way to recreate transparent glow and bloom effects using any of the volume shaders in Arnold due to the limitations regarding alpha channels.  And using object lights or the Ai Standard Surface Shader and its Emission feature inside of a volumetric object is extremely slow to render, is very limiting and can't really achieve the right look of glare and bloom.

I have seen many posts around the internet from people asking about how to do this in Arnold, but the response is usually something along the lines of "do it in post production" using other programs.  However this has many of its own problems and difficulties and because of the manual nature of applying glow effects in other programs, it is never going to be as accurate or as quick to produce.

The later versions of Mental Ray had a very useful effect where a bright glow/glare could be reflected off of shiny materials in the scene, which would be nearly impossible to recreate correctly by hand in other programs, especially in complex scenes with moving cameras.  Maya Software still contains glow effects that are pretty useful, but possibly a more modern version of these should be integrated into Arnold.  

I’ve also found through research that Vray has a plugin that simulates real-world camera lens effects such as glare and bloom that can look stunning and very realistic, and I'm sure some other rendering engines have similar such features as well.

In my opinion this is where Arnold is most lacking in terms of features right now.  It is already one of the greatest rendering engines out there, but if glow, glare and bloom functionality could be implemented, that would be immensely useful and a huge time saver for many.

Please consider this, because right now I believe that the greatest drawback of using Arnold Renderer is the absence of glow, glare and bloom effects.  And for a few years now, I thought that these features would be added in the next major releases of Maya and Arnold, but it seems to me that this may not happen on its own, so I have created this suggestion to bring awareness to this topic.  Thank you for reading.  

[Anonymous]

I very much agree with the sentiment of this post and would I'd like to add my two cents to this topic. 

I hate to bring up Vray, but there are a few things that Vray does that I wish Arnold did. First is the bloom effect, I've taken some of Grant Warwick's courses and there is a GGX tail fall off option in Vray that allows you to control to tail fall of on metal surfaces that result in that hazy ping that you often see on metals, it give the impression of bloom/glow, halo effect.  On top of that there is a dedicated bloom effect that allows luminous object to have a glow/halo effect that that only affects the brightest areas of the scene.   I'm sure Octane, Corona and I think Redshift has this bloom/glow functionality. 

Lastly I do wish Arnold's camera would mimic real world cameras.  I wish the Arnold camera operated via F-stops and could mimic ISO/ASA functionality. I know that this is probably a feature that will never be implemented but I like to think of Rendering as close to photography as possible and when making your scene brighter or darker using the aperture the current Arnold method feels a bit arbitrary to me. 

Thanks, and I hope I didn't offend anyone bringing other render engines into the discussion. 

[MoNaYLeviathan]

Also allow me to reinstate the point about how most rendering engines seem to have these glow features and Maya Software still does in some form, and Mental Ray had it as well, so there is a precedent for Autodesk Maya having these abilities. 

Maya had these useful effects for a long time and so a great many users will have used these features in the past, and many of them will still need to use them for future projects.  Not only that, but they are very useful features to have for many scenes and situations as I stated above.  There are many reasons to include such features in a future Arnold update.  

Arnold is one of the greatest rendering engines, and it is certainly the best one I've ever used, but it needs to have the glow, bloom and glare effects that it is lacking.  I truly hope the Autodesk and Arnold developer teams take this into consideration.

[MoNaYLeviathan]

It has now been a few years and no solution to this has been implemented yet, and many of us still need this capability.  We have all been very patient waiting for features like this, and though the new imagers in Arnold seem like a good start, we still need the glow, glare and bloom functionality for many different projects and purposes.

I hope we can get them sometime this year.  

[MoNaYLeviathan]

At last!

With the latest release of Arnold, they have at last added bloom in the form of the lens effects imager.  I am very pleased with this, it has been long awaited.  I sincerely thank the Autodesk team for finally delivering this feature.

The only thing I'd like to see is for it to have the option to render an alpha channel so that the glow will still be visible in a scene where something like lightning or fire is being rendered on an empty background.  In other words, allow the bloom to have an alpha channel so that you can save a transparent PNG image and still retain the effect.

Thanks again.