Emissive textures in Max

J O T

Hi guys, I'm wondering if anyone can help me with emissive textures in max. I have a few areas of a texture that need some glowing effects. So far, I have just used self-illumination but this won't give any glowing effect. So any help with how to set it up would be great.
Thanks, it wasn't in the help files and I had no luck seaching around.

J O T

Maybe radiosity with masks in the shader to isolate the areas? This is for a game model, so I wasn't wanting fancy renders, but maybe this a way to get by it.

Xenobond

Check out the Shellac Material. If you haven't used it before, you can find all the info on it in the help file.

MoP

If you make a texture for your emissive (glow) map, use black for anywhere you don't want to glow, and colours/bright areas for glowing spots.

Then put this texture into the Self Illumination slot, and check the "color" checkbox next to it. This should enable the glow map properly for rendering.
To view it in real-time as well as render, turn on the DirectX Display of Viewport Material (for Max7 and up).

Tintin

like what Mop said, if you want a stronger nextgen glow, use a output material stick the glow map there, toy with the output amount and also you can enable realtime preview if you want.

J O T

Thanks guys. I was doing as MoP said, but this doesn't seem to throw any light on the nearby geometry. I thought thats what emissive does? Is emissive the same as gloom? I guess I could also just throw a light next to it.

Joshua Stubbles

Emissive is a glow texture. It doesn't light anything. Post-Processing is required to add a "glow" around the emmisive effect. Jogshy's Xnormal does this very well.

Ryno

Add a Rendering > Effects > Lens Effect > Glow. Key it in to your Material ID Channel, or the Object ID. This is a post-processed effect, an won't work in a game engine.

MoP

There's no shader effect that I know of which will automatically cast light from a "glow" texture onto nearby geometry. You'd have to add lights to the scene to make it do this accurately.
It wouldn't ever happen in a game, the closest you'll get, as Ryno and Vassago said, is by doing a postprocessing effect, games use "bloom" shaders or opacity-mapped sprites to fake glow on top of an emissive texture.

J O T

I'm all over the shop on this one! Thanks guys.

Eric Chadwick

I have used Radiosity with an Adv. Lighting Override material to get emissive to cast light, then bake that back into the emissive. Looks purdy.

Joshua Stubbles

Ah yes, why didn't I think of that? Damnit, Eric. You're brilliant!

Great tip.

Eric Chadwick

Thanks man. One of my pet peeves I guess. If it's supposed to be glowy, it should be casting too!

conte

EricChadwick that's cool tip, but did u seen glow arround Fable characters when u looking at them? how they doing it?
Xenobond, i guess, shellac don't support normal maps,
coloured specular maps...

Eric Chadwick

Haven't see the game in action, but usually those are particles/billboards/sprites... polygons that always face the viewer. Doom 3 had a nice trick where they faded the transparency of the sprites as you got parallel with the emissive surface, so the glow fades away nicely.