Sun Feb 26, 2006 10:46 pm
Glowing textures on a single material
Ok bear with me here, I am not a modeling or modding newbie but I have an honest question. Maybe I missed it somewhere or maybe what I want to do is impossible.
I am working on a full re-release of the starlancer ships. Nothing all that special just come cleaning of the models, and textures.
One of the things I am working on is giving the ships glows. The standard method seems to be to divide the ship into groups with the glows in seperate groups so they can have their own iluminating materials applied to them.
Now I have working versions of the ships with the glows in place and they look quite spiffy, however the method I was forced to use is barbaric to say the least. These models were never made with anything resembling glowing textures in mind. They are single form meshes and splitting them up for glows is just not feasible. What I have done so far is to create a second skin above the primary and skinned it with a transparent texture on which I have overlayed the glows. This works fine but I hate to think about the load on the engine from this method. What I want to do is use a single material assigned to the mesh and use UTF to add a definition for a glowing texture to be applied. In SFC we would add lightmaps to ships which where simple B&W contrast maps which would cause their brightness to be added to that of the base texture. Resulting in(when done well) a beautifully glowing texture map on the model.
Anyway this is what I have been trying to accomplish and no matter what I do whithout using a second material entry all I can get is to make the texture Either emissive or not I cannot seem to get the emissive layer to be additive to the base texture.
I am working on a full re-release of the starlancer ships. Nothing all that special just come cleaning of the models, and textures.
One of the things I am working on is giving the ships glows. The standard method seems to be to divide the ship into groups with the glows in seperate groups so they can have their own iluminating materials applied to them.
Now I have working versions of the ships with the glows in place and they look quite spiffy, however the method I was forced to use is barbaric to say the least. These models were never made with anything resembling glowing textures in mind. They are single form meshes and splitting them up for glows is just not feasible. What I have done so far is to create a second skin above the primary and skinned it with a transparent texture on which I have overlayed the glows. This works fine but I hate to think about the load on the engine from this method. What I want to do is use a single material assigned to the mesh and use UTF to add a definition for a glowing texture to be applied. In SFC we would add lightmaps to ships which where simple B&W contrast maps which would cause their brightness to be added to that of the base texture. Resulting in(when done well) a beautifully glowing texture map on the model.
Anyway this is what I have been trying to accomplish and no matter what I do whithout using a second material entry all I can get is to make the texture Either emissive or not I cannot seem to get the emissive layer to be additive to the base texture.