Trying To Replicate This Light. Any tips?

[dylancelm]

Hello everyone! I am very new to Keyshot and I am still learning as I go but I'm working on a cop car with emergency lights and I want to replicate this light in this video. I've tried the basic way of lighting these light bars but I really love the way this one looks and how bright it is. 

[cereal]

You can increase the bloom intensity and radius (project->image->effects) to give all light sources a more vibrant and shining look. You can always type in a value, even if the slider is already set to the max.

[dylancelm]

I've tried that but I still can't get the same glow. Like these lights here. I definitely think it might be in post production. 

[mattjgerard]

I've tried that but I still can't get the same glow. Like these lights here. I definitely think it might be in post production.

Can almost gaurantee that those glows are post work. I do glows on LED's on product on a regular basis, and I gave up tring to get them done in KS, which is fine, I'd rather have the flexibility to change and tweak the glow quickly rather than having to re-render the entire image.

[dylancelm]

Thanks Matt! I definitely think its done through After Effects. Do you mind if I ask what you use to make your lights glow? 

[mattjgerard]

I do mine in photoshop using the outer glow in the layer styles. Sometimes they look great with simple inner and out glows, but sometimes it take a couple layers and a couple of weird transfer modes. I have no real recipe, just some frantic knob twiddling and button pushing until it looks good.

In all the years I've worked in AE, yeah I could see doing this in there, oddly some things are sooo much easier tool-set-wise to do in AE than PS its really odd. I know I've got some glow-streak-highlight plugins in AE that I don't have in PS that would do this sort of thing. Tons of tutorials out there too for light glows. Andrew Kramer at videocopilot is like the king of glows and optical effects in AE, and alot of his use stock plugins. Might want to check some of his stuff out.

And lots of reference images.

EDIT: Looking at the images you have above, you can't really see any of the geometry behind the glows/light, so you will have to focus on making the glow falloff look right,  don't be afraid to use lots of layers of similar but slightly different colors of the orange/red as the glow extends out.

[dylancelm]

I've been really thinking about getting Element 3D for After Effects just because I'm going to start doing more Animations. My workflow is really slow from getting my animations from Keyshot to After Effects. Do you have any recommendations?

[mattjgerard]

I've done a lot of work in element about a year ago. very cool program for what it is, it can't replace Keyshot as far as materials and realism goes, but its great for tight integration with AE projects. This is typical use of Element for me-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPzjgA1OJdQ

As you can see if you are used to trying to do cool stuff from within AE, its definitely a huge step up, and its pretty fast with the right GFX card. As far as I can tell its all OpenGL based, fairly real time. But it is in no way the same quality render as you would get out of KS. I would say it has a different purpose than Keyshot. If it fits the need, then its the proper tool to use. There is give and take though.  Quality vs speed. I've been through all the solutions, from GPU rendering, Element (openGL/CL based) and CPU now with Keyshot. Each has their own strengths and I would be hard pressed to make one fit another's purpose.

I certainly would have a hard time going back to Element after seeing the quality of the Keyshot renders.  What is yor workflow for getting renders to AE? There might be some ways to speed that up. But the final render will always take a while, but there are render farms out there than can kill off those jobs pretty darn fast. Render out ugly low res proxies to edit and composite with, then when you have it all locked down send off the final to a render farm and just replace the footage when you get the frame stacks back.

[dylancelm]

Right now, Im just exporting my animation from Keyshot then putting in my effects from After Effects.