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This page gives information about the Self Illumination Render Element.

Overview

The Self Illumination Render Element stores the illumination of any self-illuminated materials in the scene. It isolates self-illuminated materials, including V-Ray Mesh Lights, objects with the VRayLightMtl, and any objects with Self-Illumination enabled in their V-Ray material. This render element is useful for brightening or color-correcting self-illuminated materials in the final composite.

For example, the material VRayMtl has a parameter for self-illumination. If this parameter is set to a non-black color value, this render element shows the results of the self-illumination.

V-Ray for 3ds Max > VRaySelfIllumination > Max2023_VRay6_RenderElements_UIpath.png

V-Ray for 3ds Max > VRaySelfIllumination > VRaySelfIllumination_hero.png

Parameters

This render element is enabled through the Render Elements tab of the Render Setup window in 3ds Max and displays its parameters in a rollout at the bottom of the window:

VRayVFB – When enabled, the render element appears in the V-Ray frame buffer.

Deep output – Specifies whether to include this render element in deep images.

Color mapping – Applies the color mapping options specified in the Color mapping rollout (Render Setup window > V-Ray tab) to this render element. This option is enabled by default.

Multiplier – Sets the overall intensity of the render element, where 1.0 is the standard multiplier.

Denoise – Specifies whether to denoise this render element.

V-Ray for 3ds Max > VRaySelfIllumination > Max2023_VRay6_VRaySelfIllumination.png

Common Uses

The Self Illumination Render Element is useful for changing the appearance of self-illuminated surfaces, after rendering, in a compositing or image editing software. See the render before and after compositing.

V-Ray for 3ds Max > VRaySelfIllumination > Beauty_500_self_Illum.png

V-Ray for 3ds Max > VRaySelfIllumination > VRaySelfIllumination_CC_500_self_Illum.png

Compositing Formula

The VRaySelfIllumination Render Element is Added to the Beauty render to form the final image.

V-Ray for 3ds Max > VRaySelfIllumination > self-Illum_formula_resized.png

Notes

This element contains only the light geometry itself, not the light emitted from it. Lighting information is contained in the Lighting Render Elements.