How to make glow in textures

serialkiler

like i have a lamp uv textured. i can make it look good on mental ray but i want to use that in a game.

How can i add glow to objects in texture. Ambient oclusion or what ??

serialkiler

im trying to add an effect like this blue gems..

http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=69732

Tanks in advance..

DarthNater

Depends on what engine you use. You need to make an Emissive map. Basically just make the areas you want to glow white (or whatever color you want it to be) then make the other areas black.

serialkiler

other than emissive map ? any way around it ??

BTW whats for ambient occlusion ??

BradMyers82

There are a lot of names for what you are looking for. Bloom, Glow, Emissive are just a few.
It really all depends on what software you are trying to get a glow effect in.

Are you trying to get real time effects, or post process?

Anyways, like I said there are a number of ways this can be done.

In 3ds max the easiest way for realtime viewing is via a plugin called shaderfx: http://www.lumonix.biz/shaderfx.html

You can also do this in UDK, Torchlight, and with some trickery Marmoset Tool Bag.

Start digging around, and you will find more!

DarthNater

serialkiler wrote: »

BTW whats for ambient occlusion ??

Ambient Occlusion

I usually explain it to someone who has no idea about 3d modeling or texturing as this:

If an object was lit from every single direction, with the exact same amount of light, its a map of that light (the dark and light spots).

Think of it as a way to get shadows into your maps without making it look lit (crude example, but it works).

Mark Dygert

Yep, they nailed it pretty well, not much to add other than;

serialkiler wrote: »

BTW whats for ambient occlusion ??

Ambient occlusion is the shadowing effect you get when two objects sit close together.

Think of it as the shadow you get from an ambient light source.

kodde

BradMyers82 wrote: »

There are a lot of names for what you are looking for. Bloom, Glow, Emissive are just a few.
It really all depends on what software you are trying to get a glow effect in.

Are you trying to get real time effects, or post process?

Anyways, like I said there are a number of ways this can be done.

In 3ds max the easiest way for realtime viewing is via a plugin called shaderfx: http://www.lumonix.biz/shaderfx.html

You can also do this in UDK, Torchlight, and with some trickery Marmoset Tool Bag.

Start digging around, and you will find more!

Isn't emissive usually just adding color or perhaps fullbright diffuse texture, while glow/bloom is a post process effect? I mean you couldn't make an emissive glow outside of an object, while your post-process glow/bloom would.

Oh, and I made an AO demo a while back, might help to enlighten what the effect will give you.
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTCq-bE9urE[/ame]

serialkiler

tank you guys you rock ^^

Mark Dygert

kodde wrote: »

Isn't emissive usually just adding color or perhaps fullbright diffuse texture, while glow/bloom is a post process effect? I mean you couldn't make an emissive glow outside of an object, while your post-process glow/bloom would.

Oh, and I made an AO demo a while back, might help to enlighten what the effect will give you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTCq-bE9urE

Emissive normally means a material that emits light. Most quality offline rendering engines that bounces light will pick self illumination or emissive maps up and use them as a light source. Which isn't a post effect its done at render time calculated in with the rest of the lighting. You can get a little bit of bloom glow without doing it in post, but there are post effects to really bloom the crap out of things.

Scanline in max and standard in Maya won't cast light and you get just a full bright effect with no bloom or light casting.

In Unreal shaderFX and a handful of other apps the emissive slot casts light and also blooms.

kodde

Thats cool. Didn't know that realtime engines would emit light from emissive textures.

Unreal ShaderFX casts light from emissive dynamically? Or just when baking lighting on static objects?

Will Faucher

You can make an emissive light animated in unreal. Of course, you need to mess around in kismet, but you can make, say, a light on a box flicker on and off. So it isn't baked.

kodde

Like, not just glow but emit actual light that will be received by nearby surfaces? Like FinalGather in mental ray would with some incandescence in your material?
If they do this dynamically in real time that's really impressive.

Will Faucher

It's been a while since I used unreal, but yeah, I am pretty sure it is dynamic. Because I remember that nearby geometry is affected by such an emission.

glib

Prophecies wrote: »

It's been a while since I used unreal, but yeah, I am pretty sure it is dynamic. Because I remember that nearby geometry is affected by such an emission.

AFAIK that's a relatively recent addition with Lightmass.

Mark Dygert

I'm not sure if it actually calculates the emitting lights in real time or if it crunches that when it builds like it used to do with other dynamic lights. Lets say you had a light that swung around, it would calculate all the possible lighting from that and bake it all out when it built.

Or it might be treating it like a bit like a flash light which is kind of the same thing but normally you have two versions of the light maps, light and dark. The flash light masks the dark over the light like in L4D its why you can't see other peoples flash lights.

At least that's my understanding of it, I could be way off, hopefully if I am someone will straighten it out as they almost always do around here

kodde

Dynamical as a player might enter the emissive textures range where it would cast light on the player. If you can draw whatever shaped emissive areas on your texture and it would cast light accordingly... sounds... Unreal© ^^

Regarding light mass it seems more possible.