[Scooby_Doo]

How do you create a large glowing surface that casts a glow onto other surfaces?  Omni lights doesn't seem to cut it right, either too much dithering effects or you need umpteen million to remove the dithered effect.  I thought I read something about Max's mental ray having it, but 

This is what i mean in the blue glow, you can see the stripes which isn't very authentic coming from a wide area light source.

[Water]

The low tech way would be to bake what you have - and use that in photoshop as a guide.

[Scooby_Doo]

That won't really help, because the baked texture will be textured.  I just left the textures off to make it easier to see the problem.

[Herra Tohtori]

I know nearly nothing about practical aspects of what makes models work and what doesn't, but from my point of view it seems that unless your model changes shape, it doesn't really matter if the baked texture (or glowmap) stays static, since the positions of the glowing surface and reflecting surfaces stay constant all the time. Thus the reflections keep pretty similar also. So once you get the baked texture to look good, there should be no real quality difference between dynamically rendered lighting and baked-in fake lighting.

You could bake the reflection of the glow into the glowmap itself - similar to what is going on with the Hercules' glowmap. It's made to look like the red light in the bottom pylon is reflected by the bottom surface, and it works pretty good...

[Flaser]

IMHO Scooby's already familiar with texture baking and so on, since he wrote an excellent texturing tutorial - what he's asking for is a renderer that can properly handle diffuse light sources, that don't cast such harsh bands of light/shadow.

[Raven2001]

Learn Mental Ray, it will fix your problem

Scanline is simply obsolete, and slower than MR.

[Scooby_Doo]

Learn Mental Ray, it will fix your problem

Scanline is simply obsolete, and slower than MR.

Depending on what your doing, scanline is still faster in several areas.  Besides as far as I can tell it still suffers from the lack of surfaces emitting a glow.

[Vengence]

In Max, a sky light with Light Tracer advanced lighting will kill the harsh shadows and soften stuff. In Maya, a separate layer with the Occlusion preset will do it.

[Raven2001]

Depending on what your doing, scanline is still faster in several areas.  Besides as far as I can tell it still suffers from the lack of surfaces emitting a glow.

Not really. Mental ray has a faster algorithm, you can set its settings in such a way that it renders at the same quality as scanline. Only its always faster. I dont use scanline anymore, do all my test renders in MR

As for the glow thingy its a post process effect of some kind, if im getting what you want right. Or make the omni light (must be mental ray compatible) casting raytraced shadows and with area ligth parameters. Or you can use final gather or GI (or both). Theres lots of ways to do it.

[Scooby_Doo]

The problem there, also with spotlights with very large angles, is that the light is being generated from one spot.  So the shadows appear from one spot instead of being enimiated over a wide area.

[Scooby_Doo]

Not sure how you get it faster, but with defaults, this scene rendered with scanline (3dsmax.scanline.no.advanced.lighting.hi) in 4secs and with mental ray  (mental.ray.no.gi.high)2 minutes 46 seconds.  The only time I use mental ray is if I want to produce a high quality soft shadowed image.

Theres 65 lights involved, mostly in the intake area trying to simulate glows.

[Raven2001]

I never mentioned spotlights. I mentioned area lights (thats a parameter in a lights properties). Its 2 diferent things.

Mental Ray rendered slower because by default it is tweaked for a medium quality instead of low quality (Scanlines defaults). You can tweak such settings in the renderer tab in the render menu

[Scooby_Doo]

I think I'm making headway...

Select Shadow map for type.  In Shadow map parameters set sample range much higher like 50 (max). Keep your Size to 512 or less...