new feature: glow effect for models

[titi]

I am working on a new glow effect for models. ( nearly done, will be checked in tomorrow )
The idea is to allow a mesh to be rendered like a glowing particle. for this I madea new switch in the g3d format and the blender importer/exporter.

With this you can make things that glow at night without using particles! Like eyes of a Dragon or whatever. A tiny problem is that things get more and more transparent ( like particles do ) when using darker colors, but play with it to see,

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Herer its used in a tileset:
Day:

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Night:

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Glowing eyes in team color and flowers ( only 50% of possible glow effect ):

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[Ishmaru]

Wonderful idea!  I hope that you can define glowing regions via textures rather than just meshes. 

[Omega]

Very cool. I can forsee a lot of uses for these.

Am I correct in understanding that the tileset image you posted has objects placed on the map to make the glow (and not part of the ground texture)? It'd be even better if there was some way to create glow in the texture directly. That'd be harder, though. One possibility is to create a "glow map" that is a simple monochrome texture where white = glowing at max brightness and black = no glow. Then each image for the tileset texture could be associated with a glow map (and the color of the glow could be specified in the tileset XML).

A question for the glowing models: how is the color specified? Is it obtained from the texture?

[titi]

At the moment its a model The texture manipulation is another way to achieve this.

Yes, the color is taken from the texture so it's in fact a glowing texture, but the switch to enable glow is mesh dependend.

[Coldfusionstorm]

So this is a walkable model with a glow texture correct?.
(very cool with glowing effect btw).

[kagu]

Very nice effect, also a cool tileset  .
OT: whats that unit xD , a new tech tree ?

[Carl the Great]

No, that's one of wciow's Goblin mod units.

Do the "flowers" look like mushrooms or spores, or does it appear like a specific flower?

[titi]

It's checked in now, I would be very happy if someone can document it in the wiki!

@Carl: The tileset  is a pandora like tileset from avatar I am currently working on. those flowers are tiny and not meant to be something special, just glowing little flowers .

[wciow]

I want to test this but I don't know where to find the updated exporter. Link?

If I can test it then I will update the wiki with how to use it.

[titi]

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MegaGlest/megaglest-source/develop/source/tools/glexemel/g3d_support_b269.py

[Kreeith]

Seems really cool..

I would love to see this in Si Fi or swamp like maps.

[titi]

wciow did you test it? ( or anyone else ?)

Do you have an idea how to make models glow at night/day only ? How would a xml look like to do this as it is obvously model related?

[wciow]

Yes, the Earth totem in Goblins mod uses this feature for its eyes. Seems to work OK. Glow is more visible at night than in the day. Any plans to workaround the transparency problem?

[titi]

to be honest I have no idea how to fix the transparency thing. It works exactly the way as particles "glow".