I am trying to make a material that glows around the edges and where light is hitting it. Easy enough with a Falloff Map, I know, The tricky part is, I want to be able to see through the material to the background, but not to the rest of the object that has the material applied, since there are multiple elements and it starts to look ugly.

I’ve achieved an almost-perfect look my using a Composote material to put a flat black material under the material with the falloff map. This looks the way I want it to, but obviously isn’t transparant. I’d be willing to use After Effects to remove the black from the rendered frames, but it always leaves a little bit of the black.

Has anyone done this? I feel like I’ve tried every combination of Composite, Falloff and Matte/Shadow maps, and I’m out of ideas.

How about using a blend material. The two materials inside the blend would be the solid or glowing material where the light hits, and the other would be a matte/shadow material. Make the mask the a falloff map set to shadow/light.

If you want the edges to be visible as well, you can nest this blend material inside another blend material with the falloff map mixing the two.

3ds Max 2009 SP1, 2010 SP1
Maya 2012
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Dual Intel Xeon E5520, 6 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 OC

Perfect! Thanks a lot, that works great! Never used a Blend material before.