Need to render that climactic "end of act 3" dash from the exploding building or self-destructing mothership?
With Final Gather, you can make some nice rim lighting.
Make some stuff.
Turn on Final Gather in Mental Ray.
Make the background environment of the rendering camera some color other than black if you wish. It will be treated as incoming light to the Final Gathering occlusion shader.
Put a plane behind the object. Give its incandescence channel a bright color.
Express the color of the background plane's incandescence in Hue Saturation Value (HSV) space. Turn the Value up much greater than 1.0 -- in this case, I've turned it up to 5.0
To create an even greater "wrap-around" effect, warp the plane into a shallow bowl shape.
Hide the incandescent object by turning it invisible to primary rays.
** If you need to synch the light spill to an exploding mothership, try mapping a movie of the explosion onto the invisible incandescent objet.
Remember to turn the value of the color gain on the movie up nice and high.
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Thanks!
I like yours, too.
This book you mention sounds interesting:
http://www.nuzz.org/journal/?p=5
I'll second that.
Great site, and cool FG technique :)
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very diversion.