Development > Artwork
New Feature: "Glow" textures
MCR:
I made a (decent) glowmap for the interior of the Herakles dropship (base/models/aircraft/drop_herakles).
Attached is the 'posterized % color-palette reduced version' of the glowmap already (reduced size from 6.62 to 1.83 kb):
MCR:
Some other important information for the glowmap makers out there ;):
If you want to influence the glow via the glowmap texture it makes no difference which brightness the colors have there (on my computer).
You can influence the color of the glow though with the colors you choose in your glowmap...
If you want to make the glow less intense via the texture you have to delete some pixels in your glowmap or make the glowing areas smaller...
Here a example of this:
1st picture: appearance in-game
2nd picture: glowmap of the fighters engines
MCR:
I will adjust the glowmaps of ufo-fighter & ufo-scout for the default glow-strength of 1.0 to make them glow less intense & more detailed & will also use the method described in the post below to optimize their filesize ;)...
MCR:
Important Information II:
Everyone making glowmaps should use the posterize function of his/her image-editor to reduce the colors effectively used by the glowmap.
As the brightness of the colors does have no effect in-game on my computer @ all, even the most complicated (rainbow) glowmaps should never have to use more than 256 colors...
So after posterizing your glowmap you should reduce the color-palette used to @ least 8bit = 256 colors.
This will help us reducing filesize needed by our glowmaps in a massive way.
Most of the glowmaps will use less than 10 different colors I suppose, our green fighter-engines glowmap for example can be reduced from 24 to 2.78 kb (!) using this method without changing the effect in-game...
With this optimization our glowmaps will be loaded into memory real fast ;)...
arisian:
Actually, the brightness of your texture *will* affect the brightness of the glow. As an example, take the following two screenshots; the only difference was which version of the plasrifle_gm texture was used. As you can clearly see, the glow is brighter in the second screenshot, due to the fact that the colors in the glowmap are brighter in the second version of the texture.
It should still generally be possible to reduce the colorspace, given that the majority of models shouldn't have that many different colors of glow (Mattn's computer aside). If you're using PNGs, there are even automated tools that will do the colormap for you (eg. pngrewrite).
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