Creating realistic illuminated portholes/windows for starships / cityscapes

Hello all,

This is my first post, and I am trawling the net to find a tutorial on creating the blue portholes/windows that you get on spaceships. I have the Amazing Sci-Fi Textures from Marlin Studios, and also 3d Studio Max.

My main confusion is are the portholes created with the texture map and a glow applied afterwards or are the porthole created at model level.

I'd really like to greeble the effect and add the lights to it that way...

Any ideas or tutorials?

Much appreciated.

Mik
London (UK)

 

Been trying for days and still having no luck ;(

 

Depends on how far your camera is going to be from the object, really.

The usual method is to create a texture for the "Self Illumination" material slot, which dictates what is generating light and what isn't (not literally...in the Max scanline renderer, it'll just look like it's a light panel. In the Mental Ray engine with Final Gather turned on they would actually generate light).

The end effect is an all-black image with little white/blue/whichever spots all over for your lights. You have to be careful in lining them up and clumping them to look like actual lights, but the end result can be very convincing.