Light Emitting Objects in Maya?

I'm working on lightmapping a scene, and ran into a question. In Maya, is there any way I can get a polygon object to emit light? I have been searching the net, and the direction I'm currently headed is to use Final Gather rendering with a material that has some Incandescence? I can't seem to get it working though. Does it require some shader networks . . . in which case I don't even know where to begin.

Thanks,
- Matt

 

Yeah, that's a method I've used in the past and it works well. Turning on Final Gather should do the trick. If you need it, I'd be more than happy to whip up a little example scene.

 

That would be absolutely fantastic!

My next question would be: is there any way to have an object emit light, but still have the texture be visible instead of just a glowed-out look to it.

Thanks much, Ethan.

 

Getting these final gather effects to bake just right requires a lot of swapping out of different meshes and textures. I'm pretty busy right now with a lot of stuff (not to mention Christmas of course :wink, but I promise to make an example Unity Project with multiple methods for baking light emitting surfaces in Maya before the New Year rolls around...

 

No worries! I certainly understand being busy, and especially now with the holidays. I appreciate it no matter how long it takes. Take your time and have a great holiday.

- Matt

 

Using Mental Ray in Maya along with Maya native shaders will probably cause some worries in the long run... I prefer using the proper Mental Ray shaders (Phong, blinn etc.), and using some of MR's utility nodes will do the trick. Which and how solely depends on what we're dealing with.

However, if we're talking about a basic lamp with a clothy screen, with a per say black pattern on it, you could just make an extra file with the pattern, and use this as an incandescense map.

The point is, that incandescence will make some pseudoemittance of light to the surrounding meshes. Tweaking the diffuse and specular options will keep the emittance, and block the "glow" (I assume shaderglow is turned off).

Finally, you could do it in a whole different renderpass/bakeset. All roads lead to Rome, it's just a matter of time of arrival.

 

You could try using area lights / volume lights to simulate the incadescent object without expensive final gathering / global illumination. This should make it easy to mix incandescence, textures and diffuse/specular shading on the same object.