[HUTCHISONHATCH]

A recent project required that a string of "party lights" be reflected in a gently moving water surface. When asked if it could be done, my response was "no problem". Of course it turned out to be a big problem that I eventually solved with a bunch of "cheats".
Can anyone out there advise me as to the "right way" to get a glowing light bulb to be reflected in a surface complete with "glow" and some degree of control over it's intensity?
Thanks,

[Johnny9ball]

When you all glow in Lightwave it is a post process after the image has been rendered so reflections of the glow are not calculated only the surface where glow is added. If the image is a still image you can easly add some blur to the reflections in Photoshop or some image manipulation software and this will add some nice soft reflections and can make the lights appear to glow in the reflection, although you probbly do not want to blur the water surface to much. You can also blur the reflections themselves under the Environment tab in the surface editor, but this can add monster render time. I have also read that you can use Hvox's for your glow effect and they will glow in all reflections.

[HUTCHISONHATCH]

Thanks for the "lightning response"!

I have become painfully aware of glows, lens flares, etc. all being "post process".

This was a 60 frame animation for a hologram, I have attached a "thumbnail" of one of the frames. The client had specified the lighting conditions which made things difficult with regards to the technical requirements of the holographic imaging process.

Some of the "blur" functions could have proved useful if I had been able to exercise control over the reflected intensity of the lights. No such luck!

Could LW7.5 "luxigons" be the answer?

I hadn't thought of Hypervoxels, I will definitely pursue the lead - thank you!

It seems strange that one cannot reflect a "point light" in a surface.

[Mr_Bester]

If I'm not mistaken, Luxigons are just placeholders for lights, but I am no expert.
Dug

[buco]

[buco]

[buco]

Sorry for the lack of description but I was really busy..
Basically it works like this: the light is a real glow light and for the reflections I faked the glowing modeling a real sphere and playing with edge blend and gradients (render faster than hypervoxels); the sphere is unseen by cam but seen by rays so it can be reflected. All shadowing parameters are set to off and it's linked to the real light. You can easily change the luminosity intensity using a chan follower (or something similar) linking sphere's luninosity to the intensity of the main light. Hope this helps.
If you've better ideas let me know