Optical light FX in mental ray

[mantrid]

Hi,

I'm a bit stuck with Mental Ray for a particular project involving holographic CG content. The 3rd party plugin renders through 8 cameras to attain the content from maya. There is no scope for post-processes, compositing or 2D effects of any kind. This has to be entirely software rendered essentially. The problem I need to produce a sparkly disney-esque lighting optical effect, essentially the same sort of thing as the Maya software renderer's opticalFX. I'm not rendering with the maya renderer because the mia_material_x produces a particularly pretty gold which the client loves, and I've given up trying to match the quality of with the maya renderer. I've googled a lot, but I can't seem to find any way to produce such an effect with Mental Ray. There must be some clever trick someone is aware of. I've tried using the mia_surface_light but it merely emits light from an object, it does not produce star-like shards or anything. I've even tried shaping some geometry like a shard-star, but its rubbish. Ideas anyone?

Thank you very kindly.

[mantrid]

So it seems as I google the issue further, that an awful lot of people would like an aswer to this, and no one has proposed one here. I have however sorted this. So if anyone is interested, I used a couple of solutions. Lens bloom effect that comes with mentalcore. However, beyond a more sparkly look to highlights, this failed to actually work in the version of mentalcore I had available...various version updates have had issues with that and required further updates/fixes. However, in watching the demonstration on youtube, I discover that the control of the halo and shards/star effect is all within the default maya glowShader....which obviously works in mental ray. Now, if I did a little node comping I could apply that to the highlights without mentalcore. However I had a pretty enough look already to the main material. What I now needed was the blooms to come off the sparkly particle system. So I simply attached a standard blinn to the particles with glow, and set the glowShader to make it look like a much nicer version of maya's opticalFX. Looks lovely, and very simple.