A quick 3DS Max / Mental Ray tutorial that will help you create a neon glow texture. You’ll learn to use the mental ray material and the Glow (Lume) map. The resulting textures will be procedurally generated and will only require 3DS Max and the included Mental Ray renderer. This really simple technique works best on smaller objects and not neon close-ups

The result

Notice: This is not the only way to create this effect and it’s definitely not the best one either. It’s more of a glow map demonstration case for beginners. This is what you’ll get

Although I’m using 3DS Max 2011 the process is basically the same on most previous versions.

1/4 Open the provided scene

We’ve prepared a simple scene to speed things up for you. Download it here. It’s compatible with 3DS Max 2011 and 2010. It includes three 3D text objects, a textured background plane, a camera and a light source.

If you can‘t download the file or you have an older version of 3DS Max you can use any 3D objects you want. Remember that using objects that don’t have a neon-like shape (tubular or similar) will not look great. Also, this texture requires a background plane so you can see the glow.

2/4 The Mental Ray material

Before we start please maximize the Camera window (right corner) by pressing “Alt+W”. Open the Material Editor {} by pressing “m” and select the first empty slot. Now press the “Standard” button on the right side of the material’s name and assign a Mental Ray map from the Material Browser.

Click the surface map slot and assign a Glow ( Glow(Lume) in older versions of 3DS Max ) map from the Material Browser.

Set the Glow, Surface Material and Diffuse color to any color you want and set the Brightness to 35 (we’ve used an all-time crowd favorite – blood red).

Hit the “Go To Parent” {} button once and drag and drop the surface map you’ve created to the shadow map slot and copy it as an Instance.

Now select a scene object and press the “Assign Material to Selection” {} button from the Material Editor.

3/4 Duplicate material

This effect  is proportional to an object’s size. Drag and drop the original material to the next empty slot. Change the Glow map’s Surface Material, Glow and Diffuse color to whatever you want (we’ve used a cool blue) and its brightness to 40. Now assign {} the new material to the smaller 3D text object.

4/4 Render Setup

If you would render the scene now you would see the result is a bit to noisy and just not bright enough. Open up the Render Setup window {} by pressing “F10“, switch to the Indirect Illumination tab and set the Diffuse bounces to 3. If you increase the diffuse bounces you will get a somewhat brighter, more evenly lit scene.

Now switch to the Renderer tab and set the minimum Samples per Pixel to at least 1 (or at most 4).

Now if you render the image you should come up with something like this:

O fin

Whaaaat? That’s all ?
Well, not really. You should play with the settings you’ve seen in this tutorial and find the perfect match for your scene.  Remember that higher render settings come at the cost of render time.