Hello all.

I have recently been having a load of trouble getting Polaris textures to glow properly in Infini-D, and was wondering if any of you had any pointers.

Here is what I have so far:
(url="http://"http://www.evula.org/vigilantisim/Pol2.jpg")http://www.evula.org...ntisim/Pol2.jpg(/url)

The scene is set up with very dim lighting, and the main texture set at something about 5000% blend. As you can see, the main hull is horribly underlit, and the texture seems to change a great deal, from discoloration, to bleaching, due to overshading.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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The artist formerly known as baron-of-zen.
(url="http://"http://www.evula.org/vigilantisim/")http://www.evula.org/vigilantisim/(/url)

I think that what you're going to need to do is render twice. Once is a "beauty pass" of the ship in full lighting (or at least the lighting that you intend to use), and a second "malibu pass" of the glowing bits against black (or near black). Go into photoshop and erase everything from the malibu pass except for the lights. Copy the lights and paste them into a new layer over the beauty pass. Blur it several times until you get the effect you want. Otherwise, I have no suggestions.

Matrix.

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"Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool."

Wrestling With Infini-D Basics #Dunno: Glows In Composed Textures Without Diffuse
aka. if you want just the glow and no shading

Assuming you made the glows as an image with an alpha map:
1. Apply as normal but put the percentage for the "surface" channel to 1%.
2. Make another version of the texture which is completely black (or whatever shades you want, where black is full glow and white is no glow) but has the same alpha map.
3. Add this texture with the same size, mapping, position, etc. parameters as the color map.
4. Set this texture layer to only affect glow (only check that box), set to 100%, and set the layer opacity to 10,000% (that's ten thousand, not a typo).

You can leave your base texture settings at normal values. Basically, what you do is make the color/diffuse part of the glow very dark so it won't be visibly illuminated by lights, and then bumped the glow strength way up to compensate. The end result is a normal-looking glow.

This mini-tutorial has been brought to you by the Reveal What Weep's Learned campaign, and as always, sleep loss.

BTW, as far as I know the Polaris logo (pink teardrop thing) usually is just painted-looking, and not glowing.

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(This message has been edited by Weepul 884 (edited 03-06-2003).)