Glow particles tip.

[blur959]

Hi all, I am trying to glow the head of my particle trail. Is there a good way of doing it?( Without the use of shaders hopefully? )

I set up a scene and I managed to group the head of the particles according to age. But I do not know how to proceed.

All help provided is much appreciated.

Thanks.

glow_tip.hipnc

[3dbeing]

Is there a good way of doing it?( Without the use of shaders hopefully? )

A couple of questions...

Why not use shaders?

Why not glow in comp?

But otherwise you could create a volume and use the pyro shader, but i guess that's a shader... I'm a bit confused...

[old school]

If you want to glow in mantra, the best way is to instance lights to your points and then put the points in a volume to get the glow. Not done very often but can get you exceptional results.

Almost always you will glow in comp.

Mantra and most render engines really render geometry. To get glows beyond the geometry, you have to resort to fog shaders or lit volumes. Fog shaders are run after the geometry shader is complete btw. It's just the way many render engines works. Unless you use a physically correct render engine that supports lens aberrations. Some support this post-process in the render engine. Mantra doesn't because most everyone does this in comp and Houdini has a built-in compositor perfectly suited for this.

In comp, you can do blurs based on brightness with lots of control so that is why you do glows in comp. It also means you don't need to re-render the scene to alter the glow amount.

[blur959]

Okay got it. Thanks for all the replies.