The Great Bridge of Queen Street

SCKChui_dialogue_2006.pdf (4109kB)

The full title of the work is: A Dialogue on the Great Bridge of Queen Street and the Purpose of Cities.

It is the presentation for my final year design project for my Bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Auckland. The title pretty much sums it up.

Dull Renders? Use Bloom!

OK, so there's nothing particularly revolutionary about this trick, but I thought it might be useful.

Those who are into their computer games and computer graphics will know what Bloom lighting is. For those who don't, check out the Bloom (shader effect) entry at Wikipedia. Basically, you take the rendered image, increase the contrast, blur it, then overlay it onto the original image. The effect is that the bright areas will bleed into the surroundings, which looks like the glare effect one would experience when looking at a very bright object.

For me, I was trying to figure out how to make my presentation renders look more attractive (as you do). It's very easy to do a bit of light blooming in Photoshop, and the results are well worth the effort.


The first image is the render from 3DS Max. Daylight system, Mental Ray, global illumination, final gather. (Look up the words in bold in the relevant program's help files if you're interested).


Next I put it into Photoshop and I adjusted the Brightness/Contrast. If I remember correctly, I increased both by 40, but obviously the number would depend on the image and the effect you're going for.


Then I duplicated the layer (Duplicate Layer), and put a Gaussian Blur filter on it, with a pixel radius of 10. The amount of blur will affect the spread of the light bleeding, and you might want to experiment a bit to find out what looks good to you.


Finally, I set the top (blurred) layer blending mode to "lighten" and the layer opacity to 50, so that only the light will bleed, and only moderately.

I think the result looks pretty good. Easy process. If you're making an animation, you can even record an action and batch all the frames in Photoshop. Not bad, eh?