Glowing Textures

[jzeus]

I've been trying to make a peice of jewelry glow for the last hour or 2 and I am getting nowhere. I can make it glow white using what I got from https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/$selfillum#.24selfillum_textures

The only part that I can see has ANY discernable effect is having "LightmappedGeneric" under "VertexlitGeneric"in the vmt. This is clearly what is creating the white glow, $selfillum 1 is obviously having nor effect whatsoever. What I need to do is change the colour of the glow, for which the advice on the aforementioned page has been of no use.

I've rewritten this vmt countless times now, cut bits out of dozens of vmts that make things glow to try and get somewhere and nothing seems to be working. Guessing I'm doing something wrong but there have been so many vastly different iterations of this vmt that you'd think something would have worked other than "LightmappedGeneric"at the start, the seflillium stuff was what I was under the impression was what was supposed to create the glow effects. Any ideas about what I'm screwing up would be much appreciated

[Kumquat [Velbud]]

Well, selfillum is one piece of the puzzle, and I recommend ditching LightmappedGeneric and using VertexLightGeneric instead. To get glowy look, the best you can do is look at the parameters given and see if any catch anything close to what you are looking for. Otherwise, I recommend playing around with values, searching for a model with the closest to what you are looking for and use its VMT, or just use a light/particle for that model.

[episoder]

ofc you gotta use the vertexlitgeneric shader for models. lightmappedgeneric is for map materials only. now the question is if the glowing things are just a part of the model/texture. in that case you should have / gotta create a selfillum mask with that parts in it and whether shove the intensity (greyscale) in the alpha channel of the basetexture or incase a different color of glow is used you gotta use the $selfillummask and use a full color texture. for unicolor selfillum or color correction of the mask or plain color you can use $selfillumtint to give it the glow color. incase you wanna tweak the intensity of the mask you can use a single float. both support hdr. if you have an entirely baked texture you can use the unlitgeneric shader which will make it fullbright / glowing. you can use $color to change the color of the full bright. same as the selfillumtint it supports hdr values. in terms of loose jewelry you may also consider the refract shader with a somewhat jewelry normal map. refract precision is limited, but it should support refracttinttexture and refracttint using hdr.

[Zappy]

It would probably help us a lot if you'd copy and paste the entire content of the VMT file in a comment here. It sounds like you messed up something.

[jzeus]

Thanks, this helped. I've got it working now just a bit of trial and error to refine it exactly how I want it. This has however sparked an interest in other glowing stuff. I had an idea for a glowing tattoo, essentially runic magical markings was the idea. Just wondering how I might achieve this.

I was thinking it would have to be seperate from the base material, kinda like an overlay. Add a material to the model in blender, draw the tattoo in a sepearate layer in gimp using the base layer as a guideline. Delete base layer when finished leaving only the tattoo drawing and make it a seperate vtf associated with the new materials vmt.

Any ideas if this would work, or if I'm even close? If not, any ideas how I could get this to work.

[Kumquat [Velbud]]

To make a glowing tattoo, see how Overwstch models have their glory parts and see if you can replicate the conponents, including the alpha parts for your model. Or you could make tattoo a separate model around the character model and you simplify the work for yourself.

[Kumquat [Velbud]]

So yes your method would work

[jzeus]

Lol, now if only I can get the damn alpha transparency lark to actually work..... Every time I try, can't get the transparent background to work, justs come out at black or white where the models textures should be showing.

[Kumquat [Velbud]]

Did you add the $alpha or $alpha_test line to the VMT, along with the 1 value? Yeah, that could cause issues. $translucent isnt a good idea for alphaed textures. Other than that, you may want to consider making a separate model as a last resort.

[Fluid Script Studios]

You can also add a vector3 attribute and name it $color

Set the three values very high. You can change the color of the glow this way too.

[Kumquat [Velbud]]

Doesn’t that create bloom? It’s not really a glow, rather it is just a “whitewash” of pixels around the area where it was assigned