Visual-Enhancement: Glowing Texture Maps

[ghost]

Hi Sponk! :D

Is there an easy way to make a emit-texture glowing over the edge of the actual mesh?

I need this for aesthetic reasons, for example for highlighting candlelights, flames, lava, magical runes, ...

It seems this would be only possible through a post-effect-shader, but I found no way to bring only the emit-textures to glow.

Maybe it's just because I'm still an amateur in shader programming ;)

Is there somewhere a simple tutorial for the shader programming, which I can then apply for the Neo Engine?

Many Thanks! :D

[Sponk]

Hey! Yes, a bloom effect would be implemented as a post processing effect. That implies that you can not differenciate between surfaces since all your shader gets is color data and depth data of the scene.

Is it really important that only specific items glow?

[ghost]

Hey Sponk, thank you for your response! :)

Ehm... No, I meant no overall bloom-effect.

This article describes exactly what i suggest: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130520/realtime_glow.php

This technique is very useful to create fake lights in simple surroundings.

All what the designers must do is create a simple glow-map (like an emit-map) and boom it glows at the specific parts in game (e.g. very useful for animated blinking technical things, as well for flames, lava flow, magical runes, shiny armors, and so on).

Maybe there is an simple way, to get some glow-maps via post-processing to work? :)

[Sponk]

Well, we could render another pass in black/white just for those materials which should glow and use a blurred version of that to do the actual blurring. It would require changing some rendering code though. It would then basically resemble the usual bloom effect with the difference that it only shows the materials that should be bloom'ed. My bet would be waiting for the new deferred renderer I am working on since it will do most of the work anyway and plugging in another render target would be quite easy without additional GPU cost (except bandwidth).

If you are interested: https://github.com/Sponk/NeoEditor/tree/gl4-renderer It is not usable yet and only implements a very basic rendering algorithm (that also has some problems with lighting apparently).

[ghost]

Ok, that sounds nice! :)

Currently, the neo-editor (gl4-renderer) crashes every time when I try to open a project. It seems to be the same error that brycehenley has already been reported.

Do you already have a rough schedule of when the new renderer would be ready for action? :)

I'm planning to release my debut-project in the third quarter of this year, so a small graphic-upgrade at the end of my development would be very fantastic! :)

You're doing a great job here. Keep it up! ;)