[http://sourceforge.net/p/ufoai/bugs/2462 Item 2462] imported from sourceforge.net tracker on 2013-01-28 19:35:59

Take a look @ the screenshots.
I found out that this bug does not happen with all meshes as the glow does not shine through the heads for example, but only if they also have a glowmap enabled, if they do not have a glowmap themselves (the heads) the bug reappears & the glow again shines through...
This info should help you to track down the bug...
Maybe it would be also important to note here that the bodies of the soldiers & aliens can not have any glowmaps applied, I do not yet now exactly why, because the heads CAN have glowmaps !?...
Maybe it is because of the animation frames they have, or maybe it is because the md2 files of the bodies have multiple skins defined, which we could change by using the same system like for the heads there (seperate md2 file for each head with just 1 skin defined inside the md2)...

I will try to find this out & will report here...
===== Comments Ported from Sourceforge =====

====== mcr2010 (2010-04-25 15:17:59) ======

cutted screenshot...
====== mcr2010 (2010-04-25 15:21:24) ======

Screenshot showing 'normal' meshes
====== mcr2010 (2010-04-25 15:24:08) ======

I am sorry as this bug report is actually refering to 2 different bugs...

1.Glow shines through meshes

2.Glow not enabled for soldier & alien bodies (will try to find a solution/fix for this & report here)
====== mcr2010 (2010-04-25 15:31:50) ======

It is funny to note here that the bug disappears if I add a 'dummy' glowmap with just 1 pixel to the mesh...
For example adding a glowmap for the roof of the standard firebird dropship (seen on ufo309 screenshot attached here) makes the glow not shine through the roof anymore... ;)

====== arisian (2010-04-26 12:35:12) ======

I'll take a look at this eventually, but I'm in the middle of working on normal-maps and lighting right now, so it will probably take me a bit to get around to this.
====== mcr2010 (2010-04-27 16:04:10) ======

FYI only, no stress:
Now I know for sure what I suspected first:

Normalmaps do not work if more than one skin is defined in the md2 file !
Glowmaps do not work if more than one skin is defined in the md2 file !
Only glowmaps work for the heads of our models !

The question would be if we want to eliminate those references & not use the skin support of the md2s @ all, as this does not bring us any advantage anyway afaik...

This would mean for us that we would have to rewrite some ufo script files (the team*.ufo files) which could be done in 30 minutes & we would have to reconfigure the md2s which could be a slight problem, as I do not know exactly how to 'downgrade' the number of skins in a md2 file as our great pl scripts seem to be able to upgrade the number of skins only, but I am sure there would be a way to do this...
Another version would be to correct the code from the engines side to be able to cope with the skins in the md2. This would be the most comfortable solution (for me @ least) as we would not have to redesign everything already working...

====== arisian (2010-04-27 23:43:03) ======

glow "shine-through" should be fixed now; I haven't looked at the other issues yet.
====== mcr2010 (2010-04-28 23:16:59) ======

Confirmed: glow "shine-through" fixed.
====== mcr2010 (2010-04-29 00:04:25) ======

I am now able to strip additional skins from the md2 files & to downgrade the number of skins also, so if the skins are making problems we could get rid of them (theoretically)...

====== tlh2000 (2010-06-19 06:40:43) ======

is this still an issue? maybe only animated mdoels?
====== arisian (2010-06-19 13:25:05) ======

I think this is fixed; I'll set status to pending
====== mcr2010 (2010-06-19 17:36:22) ======

Fix confirmed for body glowmaps. Great work. This allows us to make cool new glowmaps for all the high-tec on armors, etc... ;)

I cannot confirm the fix for the normalmaps yet, as I was testing this with the ATI-card & had realtime lights turned off & maybe the normalmaps did not work because of this... ;)
But I will soon test the normalmap-body&head-stuff with a Nvidia card & report here afterwards !
====== mcr2010 (2010-07-05 19:10:21) ======

I am still having troubles with applying normalmaps to the models (current trunk version r30500+) ?!
Maybe someone else could provide some working samples, as I cannot get those f*ck*ng normalmaps behave on the models like they should & I've tried many different versions of creation (GIMP normalmapping plug-in my method (30+ layers), GIMP normalmapping plug-in standard with height encoding in the alpha channel, other specialized normalmapping tools like crazybump)
I will close this tracker item nevertheless as this was mainly about the animated model with skin glowmap issue & this is something Arisian already fixed some time ago...
Thanks for that once again, Arisian, maybe you could take another look at the normalmapping issue, if you have a free minute, as this was already working nicely for me even with my malformed special normalmaps ;)

I really would like to see another big step of improvement for our alien models at least...