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Decal glow?


Tore

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This model is two flat grids, with a blue one just slightly in front of a gray one.

 

The blue one has a transparency decal on it so only part of it shows and its group is set to glow.

 

The gray group is not set to glow but is part of the same model.

 

glows.JPG

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There is no purely decal-defined glow, unfortunately. Using the transparency on a shell slightly above the regular patches is the only work-around I have.

 

In a big-time production flow they would not do the glow in the render at all. They would do a separate pass with everything black except the part intended to glow in white. That could be defined by a decal on the model.

 

That pass would be blurred and colored as desired in post and composited back onto the regular render.

 

 

 

Do you prefer the volumetric effect but just don't want the render time?

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Here's a quick proof of concept with Lens Flare over the top of an image from your new website.

Nice website!

 

 

Added" I learned something new today...

I didn't know that Layers could accept Light Lists!

LensFlare2.jpg

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Lens flares are just settings on lights so you can constrain a light to a model and even place a light(s) inside a model.

If you place them inside the model they will automatically move and rotate with the model.

 

For more versatility Lights can be Action Objects as well.

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My point about the big time work flow is... it's faster and easier. You'd be done by now and you don't have to re render if you want to change the settings.

 

 

Can you give a sample PRJ where the volumetric doesn't work?

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if there's a way to implement this feature

 

 

Which feature are you referring to?

 

Ambiance maps with glow should get the desired effect.

The Lens Flares is one of several alternatives.

Don't tell me Robert is going to have to break out a new series of "It can't be Done!": videos.

(I'm all for that!)

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There are many approaches we could take.

This one... uses Mist (one of those Volumentric Effects that no one tends to use):

 

 

Both of these Mists (one for red/right eye and one for left/blue eye) started as copies of the same Volumetric Effect but were tweaked in different directions.

 

 

 

 

mist0.png

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Here's a little 'steam' (again a Volumetric Effect) thrown into the mix to get some light projecting outward...

 

 

These are added to the Keekat model as Action Objects) so are easily drag/dropped into place and adjusted.

 

 

(This one is a screen capture of what is showing in A:M... the previous was a final render)

 

 

I'm not having a lot of luck with Dust...

Mist with Steam.jpg

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if there's a way to implement this feature

 

 

Which feature are you referring to?

 

Ambiance maps with glow should get the desired effect.

The Lens Flares is one of several alternatives.

Don't tell me Robert is going to have to break out a new series of "It can't be Done!": videos.

(I'm all for that!)

 

 

Erm... the one that this whole thread is about. :-)

 

Short'n'sweet: Is it possible to assign glow to a given decal on a model (but not to any other decal on the same model)?

As far as I have found, the answer is no.

And if so: would that be of interest enough to propose as a feature (think car ligths, glowing windows on starships, neon tubes on house walls etc. all without any modeling effort. Just a decal, wham and there was light, with a fraction of the render load compared to volumetrics)?

 

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Erm... the one that this whole thread is about. :-)

 

Sorry. I thought we already had that feature.

It's more than a little out of my experience but I think we need to use Radiosity for that.

I struck out on all my attempts. :(

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You can certainly submit that as a feature request although currently Steffen is focused on bugs rather than features.

You can reduce the render time of Volumetrics by lowering the "quality" parameter

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Obviously there are workarounds (as I stated), but Tore was asking if the feature would be useful and I was saying I would use it.

 

The ambient intensity option really isn't the same thing, though.

 

Look at this example:

 

still.png

 

On the left, there's a yellow dot decal placed on the globe on top of the earth decals. It's set to ambient intensity and it is bright. But on the left, I placed the same dot decal on a blank globe set as a cookie cutter and turned on glow for the patch.

 

That's a workaround, but I do think I'd find it useful if there was a glow property for each decal.

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I think the most likely way to make it work with A:M's use of decals is to make it a grayscale map, like other non-color maps.

 

White = full glow. Whatever is the surface color here will glow in that color.

 

Black = zero glow

 

Reach and Intensity are currently set in the Chor because Glow is really a post effect. It's done once to the entire rendered frame. The glow effect would have to be rewritten to get it to treat different decals differently.

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A new rendering feature like that is very unlikely to happen. Even if the old glow remains the same it still means writing a lot of new stuff.

 

A two-pass composite will get you what you are trying to do long before that feature will ever get written. I can show you how to do that if you want.

 

 

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There are some volumetrics in the Volumetric Effects and Lens Flares so it may be quite possible to bridge the gap and get decals to drive those type of results without a major rewrite or building new foundations. If it can be done in a reasonable way I'm sure Steffen would be up to it. He knows the A:M code thoroughly.

 

Tore, you've done your part and submitted a feature request. That's the first step toward successful implementation.

The next time Steffen is in that area of the code who knows what might happen.

 

.

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In my (admittedly brief) search for clues into how this decal driven glow might work I ran into several approaches but all seemed to have limitations that wouldn't be acceptable.

The primary one being that most emission maps can drive the glow effect but only within the silhouette of the object (or objects) in the scene.

So as we observe in a few other cases where alpha channel/transparency is set the glow effect would be clipped either all the time or when other objects don't provide a background.

 

As has been mentioned here in this topic many workarounds exist.

 

If anyone has a link to programming and implementation of emission/glow maps that would be useful in delving further into this.

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Okay... the target keeps moving. ;)

 

If we want to work in compositing/nodes we can bring a whole new level of tools into the equation.

A:M Composite provides a number of useful ways to bring glows into our scene from inside of A:M for starters as do the standard Post Effects (some of which are fairly recent additions to A:M).

 

Post processing is a cheat... which I highly approve of... but we need to compare apples to apples rather than apples to disco balls.

 

Also, keep in mind that once we invoke post effects/processing this opens up a whole new world of external programs that can work with A:M to achieve the desired results.

 

In the referenced video almost the first step is.... go into the compositor.

At this point we are in a completely different environment other than decal driven glows rendered in situ.

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