Photoshop
Using a program such as photoshop to do your glows can be a much
faster way than doing it from inside 3dsmax, since you never need to
rerender your 3d element. The general procedure is as follows...
Take your image, duplicate the image as
a layer
Heighten the contrast and reduce the brightness to get just an image
that only represents the bright parts of your image (for my test I
changed the brightness to -30 and the contrast to 90)
Desaturate the layer (you can experiment with only desaturating it
slightly or modifying the hue of this image to achieve colored glows)
Blur it with a "Gaussian Blur" filter (for this test, I used a value of
15)
Note: You can also experiment with the "Lens Blur" filter instead of
the "Gaussian Blur", which will give you a more defined defocusing
effect similar to a Bokeh
effect.
Then set the mode of the layer to linear dodge (this is an additive
blend, see my Photoshop
Tips lesson for more discussion on linear dodge and it's relation
to an additive mode). Now your have a glow layer sitting on top of your
original
image. Playing with the layer's Opacity controls how much of the glow
is mixed
with the original image.
Here's what the layers look like for this effect...
And here's an experiment with adding color to the blurred layer...
