Hello, I am fairly new at using 3ds Max, I have built a lightbulb from a common tutorial and I want to make it light up. I’ve tried lens effects > glow, but it looks crappy, I want something more profssional looking and much more realistic to a lightbulb light for the presentation, can anyone help me? I’m using 3ds Max 2011. A few tips or good tutorial on it would be much appreciated, thank you.

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I’ll assume you are using Mental Ray.  For the attached image, I created a “filament” (renderable spline) inside a thin walled glass ball.  The filament has an Arch & Design material applied, with Self-Illumination enabled and the Physical Units (cd/m2) set to 250,000.  I then enabled the Glare shader under the Camera Effects rollout of the Renderer tab of the Render Setup dialog box.  Copying the Glare to the Material Editor (instanced) I set the value of the Spread to 5.0.

You could do something similar with the material on the glass of the bulb itself, if you wanted the whole thing to glow.  This would emulate more of a frosted glass bulb, rather than a clear one as you are currently showing.

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Thank you so much! Do you by chance know how to animate the light coming on? Not immediately but progressively

You have to turn on autokey and then @ 0 keyframe set the self illumination to 0, then move the autokey slider to 100 key frame and turn up self illumination to 100 or you can use the glow function that Chris explained. Remember if you use self illumination then the light source wont shoot out photons like a regular light. If you want your light bulb to look more realistic then you would want a light source inside the bulb so you could turn on turn on GI and(in some cases) caustics. Light sources emit photons, self illum. does not.

--Hey Chris, I’ve been using vray lately so showing light sources is a lot less confusing. Do you know how to make a light source visible in mental ray.  I always forget the easy stuff.

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