gizmologist Posted September 21, 2013 Share Posted September 21, 2013 Why do vampire eyes glow? I'm trying to make my own vampire eyes that glow, so I turned to vanilla Skyrim for an example. The vampire eyes seem to use the EyesMaleHumanVampire texture set, which has an entry for a glow map, but the entry is blank. So where does the glow come from? I've got a mod that provides new vampire eye textures, but none of them glow. Only the vanilla vampire eyes ... what am I missing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gizmologist Posted September 21, 2013 Author Share Posted September 21, 2013 Interestingly, there is a texture set in Dawnguard called DLC1SeranaHumanEyes, which has a glow map entry with the value Black.dds. This makes me think that the glow isn't due to a texture. Is it from the game engine itself, but it can be overcome by a black texture? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oubliette Posted September 22, 2013 Share Posted September 22, 2013 (edited) Glowing eyes require two things - a mesh with glow maps enabled and a glow map texture. You control the strength of the glow on the glow map by using black. The darker the glow map the less glow the texture will have. The more colorful the glow map the brighter the texture will seem in game. So for eyes, you'd need an eye mesh that has glow maps enabled. Then you'd open up the glow map texture of the eyes and make sure that everything you don't want to glow is black, before painting the area you want to glow with color. You then adjust the amount of glow with an overlay layer of black set to whatever opacity you want. Edited September 22, 2013 by Oubliette Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gizmologist Posted September 22, 2013 Author Share Posted September 22, 2013 Thanks, Oubliette (which is the coolest username I've seen in a long time)! Turns out my problem was that the eyesfemalevampire.nif (from Dawnguard) in my data folder wasn't vanilla, but apparently from some mod or another, which had changed the emissive color to black. In the process of trying to figure this out, I went back to the very first mod I ever made for Skyrim, which was supposed to make Daedric arrows have glowing red fins. I could never get it to work - it CTDed every time an arrow needed to be rendered. This time around I figured out what I was doing wrong! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gizmologist Posted September 22, 2013 Author Share Posted September 22, 2013 Well, it appears that glowmaps don't work on eyes. I can get them to work anywhere else I've tried, but not eyes. Perhaps this is why Bethesda went with the ugly black sclera (the "whites of the eyes") - being black, the emissive color is muted. But that doesn't explain why the Black.dds glowmap works on Serana's eyes to suppress the glow after she is cured... more experimentation is required! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheVampireDante Posted September 22, 2013 Share Posted September 22, 2013 The eye mesh used needs to have glowmaps enabled as well, not just the texture setup. The "human" version of her is a different NPC I believe, which would be why she looks different when she returns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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