How Can I Make Something Look RADIOACTIVE ?
Fauvist
Posts: 2,038
Comic book radioactive. Like, if I have a glass bottle in a scene, and I wanted to apply a special effect to give the visual impression that it is radioactive. I tried using lights to make it glow - and the bottle lights up - but you can't see the glow unless it's reflecting off another surface, or I put a lot of dust or smoke or fog in every scene. I'd like to also be able to render daylight scenes with a radioactive effect visible. In Superman comics they just paint in a lot of green light rays shooting out of the kryptonite. I know in the real world you can't see the radioactivity like in the comics.
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If rendering with iray, you could add an emissive shader. If you're lazy like me, you use a product like this to make your object glow:
https://www.daz3d.com/real-lights-for-daz-studio-iray
and then add a prop from a set like this:
https://www.daz3d.com/special-fx-2-for-daz-studio or https://www.daz3d.com/billboards-fx-master
You might also be able to provide visual clues using other scene elements. Somebody holding a geiger counter or random bit of electronics with "danger, radioactive" showing on the screen. The object could be inside some sort of obvious thick-walled-thick-windowed containment vessel. It could be visibly causing heat or radiation damage to nearby objects, melting through the floor, surrounded by dead plants or dead rats, etc. If it's in an actual comic book you could have characters discussing it's radioactiveness. Or if you could strategically place it in a shadow you could get the glowing effect visible with the rest of the unshadowed parts of the scene still in daylight.
Just layer on a lensflare in post!
Yeah, honestly, I'd add green light in post. You could do emissives or careful point lights, yes... but then spicing it up in post? Emissive or point light only does so much before it overwhelms.
Unless you're really good with bloom so that the bloom doesn't overwhelm every other light, then to get that glow-y look without emissive surfaces overwhelming everything? You'll need some post work, IMO.
I would go with the green emissive shader myself since i would rather have the realistic lighting and shadows that faking it in post.
Second this idea with the bloom filter. You may need to adjust the threshold so it doesn't mess with other lights in the scene, but the bloom filter will give a very movie sfx quality to it.
Does radioactivity make things that sickening green colour, or is the green a fictional signal that something is radioactive?
Its invisible. You get sick. You die.
If you can actually see a glow... you have maybe minutes.
(Hours if its a mile away as happened at Chernobyl, appearently what those folks saw on top of the reactor was green. They died horribly..)
It really depends on what you want to sell as an effect. Green probably differentiates it from fire.
Hey.. Google can help... Something can glow because of radiation...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
It's ALL fake with 3d. Post isn't faking it any more than an emissive. Realistic lighting is "faked" when it comes to the look of a thing, like what Pixar does. They light for effect at Pixar, not reality. Realism for real is really kind of boring.
Bloom can do a lot, but it can also fudge up the whole look... you're going to need to thread the needle to get the right amount of glow without fudging up all the other light on your models.
But, hey, people love in-engine fussing on this forum. Look in the gallery, the top images use post. So, whichever floats your boat is good, really. It's all good.
I was going to mention bloom and promptly forgot about it again before posting. (Wow, my brain really is fried to a crisp these days!)
DS has bloom settings but I strongly prefere to apply bloom in post. You have so much more control that way.
In this particular case, you might want more bloom around your radioactive object than elsewhere in the scene. You can do things like that in post without problems.
In summary, I'd probably
1) apply a weak emissive shader to the radioactive surface to get realistic-ish reflections in the scene
2) Apply bloom in post
3) Layer on some effects.
Re not using any post: I don't get why one would bind oneself to a principle like that.
Realism? As the OP themselves notes, radioactivity in reality is invisible, so the "realistic" thing to do here would be nothing at all.
I guess it's a matter of personal taste in the end. I personally tend to like images that use post, and I think my own images have gotten better since commiting to always doing some post, even if it's just a little subtle bloom and haze.
If it's under water you get a blue glow from Cerenkov radiation. It is visible, but reasonably safe, if there is enough water between you and the radioactive material. To avoid damage due to corrosion the water used in a reactor is kept free of minerals, so it is very clear, and the blue glow is easily visible through quite deep water.
I'm not saying one should NOT apply a green glow for dramatic effect, I just found it interesting how we developed this visual trope.
Radioactive isn't a look.
radioactive material doesn't glow (green or any other colour)
the only thing that gives a glow in context with radioactivity is Cherenkov radiation : is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity (speed of propagation of a wave in a medium) of light in that medium (wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation)
this is seen in nuclear power plants in the cooling pool
still looks cool and it's a trope, for Iray bloom is the thing you want or add it in post, much simpler and quicker
Maybe the idea of the green glow comes from the old Radioluminescent watches and instrument dials. These did glow green in the dark and the early ones used radium, but it was switched in the 1960's to something less dangerous. Its easy to see how this might have given comic writers the idea of a 'green glow' from radioactive materials
When you say "in post" you mean in Photoshop? Is there a bloom filter?
Some programs do have bloom filters, but you can also use threshold to isolate the bright areas, blur them, then blend them using the "Screen" blend mode.
Put a green or yellow emmissive atom or NBC warning symbol label on it (NBC as in Nuclear Biological Chemical)
Photoshop or GIMP.
There's tutorials on youtube, but the basics (as I do it) are:
1) Coply your entire layer. I'll call the new layer "bloom layer"
2) Use "Gaussian Blur" on your bloom layer. I usually do 2 or 3 pixels. The more you blur this layer, the stronger the bloom effect.
3) I suppose you could select just one part of your bloom layer and blur that part more, so you get stronger bloom in just that part of the image.
4) Reduce the opacity of your bloom layer. I usually set it to about 30%.
5) You can leave the blending mode of your bloom layer at "normal" or you can switch to "overlay", whichever you prefere.
Render the scene and then the object seperately on a transparent background.
In photoshop, load the rendered scene, then load the render of the object on a layer on top of it.
Edit the layer properties, and apply the glow effect to the layer. You can make it go as wide as you like, and give it whatever color you want as well.
some ways to do it in Post have been described
I go the simple way (using gimp) I load the rendered scene to gimp add a transparent layer, pick the colour I want the glow in and then use a soft spray tool with reduced opacity and spray over the area but on the transparent layer. you then can play around with the layer settings, for the glow effect I like addition only, linear light, overlay, probably reducing the opacity even more.
since this isn't sensitive to "drawing mistakes" even someone with no drawing skills at all can do it
the whole Green thing came from Radium Glass.. that floureses green under UV, is radioactive, but does not glow normally.
as noted above, the only glow you do get is Cherenkov Radiation, normally seen as Blue and under water... but if you see it in air (this can happen) unless your far enough away.. yer dead.
(see the case of Louis Slotin and the Demon Core. ... he was mainipulating the 2 halves of a sub critical mass of Plutonium with a screwdriver. when the screwdriver slipped, he saw a bright blue flash before he knocked them apart. ... he was already dead at that point, just hadn't stopped moving, breathing etc....)
My nerd brain kept thinking about this so I threw together something. As always it ended up being more involved than expected...
Before and after postwork:
Gallery link
Don´t know if this is the kind of thing you´re looking for but I´m attaching the Photoshop file if you want to look into it. You need Photoshop or GIMP to open it.
I used layers, layer masks, and the blending modes "screen" and "overlay". I don´t have the patience to explain all that but it should be possible to look it up...
Fauvist, forgive me if my memory is playing tricks on me, but I think you've used Carrara in the past and have it as part of your toolbox. If so, I think you could whip up a radioactive glow pretty easily, and render it out in a render pass to outline anything else in postwork (though it's easy enough to do just in Carrara by itself, it can easily be added to whatever render you've already got).
To do, just choose the object you want to 'radiate', up in the 'Effects' tab for that object go down to 'Aura', there are lots of controls for what color the aura is, how much turbulence, how much falloff, scale and intensity, etc etc.
It won't work with just Aura enabled though; you also have to take a quick moment to enable the object's 'glow' channel in the texture room (1 or 2 percent is fine to get the effect; that way the object itself isn't perceptibly glowing but the aura is nice and visible and glowy). You can render out a post effect pass (as long as your camera is in the same position as in your original daz scene) and now you've got an aura render pass you can just easily slap on top of your original render, easy as pie.
Here's an old render from years ago that I used a blue colored aura on the creature in the chimney (you get the idea)
Hope this helps.
that's a nice type of glow Jonstark
Any suggestions how to spruce up this green propelling the space craft?
I would also like to fade them out, I know how to put a mask in Gimp for textures and stuff but dont know how to make a mask for an obj such as the geometry of the green