Partially glowing eyes: How To?

[IkeCoast]

Hullo everybody!

 

I'm trying to create a custom texture for eyes, one that makes the pupil, and just the pupil, glow in the dark, the same way most animals (felines mostly) glow.

 

But looks like the way Oblivion handles eye meshes is different from the rest of meshes: I have created the _g.dds glowmap in several variations and using several procedures I found in several tutorials around there, with two results: no glowing at all, or the entire eye mesh glowing in the dark.

 

I have created the glowmap as a completely black square with a white circle in the middle, saved as DTX5 with and without mipmaps, with and without alpha channel, with the map in the diffuse layer, in the alpha layer, I've lost the count.

 

And every time, if the glowmap works, it's the entire mesh that glows.

 

I've assigned an emissive color to the mesh in Nifskope and it works flawlessly, the eyes glow the precise color I assigned them, but I don't want the eye to glow, I want just the pupil to glow. Looks like the engine just ignores my glowmaps and applies the emissive property to the entire mesh.

 

The closest result I found was when, in one of my attempts, the specular color of the mesh glowed in the dark. The eye itself remained dull, but the little "spots" of light that the sclera reflect where bright in the dark. Something like this is what I look for, a little spot of glow in the dark, in the center of the pupil.

 

Anyone knows if it's possible and how to do it? I know how to make glow-in-the-dark spots and decorations in precise parts of an armor, cloth or weapon mesh, but for some reason the same procedure doesn't work for eye meshes.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Cheers!

[DrakeTheDragon]

Hmm, I remember switching to HDR at one point messed up my previously neetly glowing eyes the exact same way you describe. I don't know why that is, but it appears to me the eyes will only glow correctly when using Bloom. Go figure.

 

Could be worth a try though, at least to find out if it's the same thing that happened to me and can't be fixed by fixing the maps, or if really something's still wrong with the way you're approaching it. If it works correctly in Bloom, it's done the right way. That it won't work in HDR then is 'not' the fault of how it's done.

[IkeCoast]

Whow, Drake, thank you for the tip. I'll check to disable HDR and try it with Bloon and none, and let's see what the *beep* happens.

 

Even if it doesn't work, I owe one to you, matey.

 

Cheers!

[IkeCoast]

ADDENDUM:

 

The eyes behave the same no matter if HDR, Bloom or none: the whole eye mesh glows, or doesn't glow at all.

 

Unless there's a specific way to create the glowmap I haven't discovered yet, or it's simply impossible to have a partial glow in an eye mesh.

 

Cheers!

[DrakeTheDragon]

I'll try to find a way to get a look at one of the glowmaps I know, but it might take a while. Holidays are over and my job's eating almost all of my free time.

However, what I do remember still is that glowmaps were simple grey-scale, with the same mipmaps as the other textures, no alpha, and going by this combination I'd also say stored in DXT1, but I'm not sure about that last part. Oblivion's pretty strict with those file formats and will flat-out reject some special texture maps, if they're not stored in the expected DX format. For some reason DXT5 just doesn't sound right to me. I have yet to check this though.

 

edit: Seems I'm missing the tools to figure the exact DX format of the files I found, but a short look at the CS WiKi confirmed my feeling. Glowmaps are stored in DXT1.

And as a sort of proof it really works, I even found this very old picture of mine lurking on my image hosts. Back then the eyes were glowing really neatly, only the pupils, the rest of the balls unaffected.

I lost all of this neat effect ever since I switched to HDR later for some reason no longer known to me now, and last it was looking like this.

Edited January 7, 2014 by DrakeTheDragon

[cross1492]

As pupils are usually black, you will not be able to make them glow unless you change the color of the pupils to a different color in the color map (texture). In other words, if you want the pupils to glow red, you will need to make the pupils red in your color map.

 

Also, the areas you want to glow will need to be white in your glow map and the emissive color, in the nif, will need to be some color other than black.

 

I hope this helps.

 

The same applies to transparency. Any area you wish to have any transparency show up in game must have a color other than "total" black (0,0,0) to work.

 

By the way, I use 8.8.8.8 (uncompressed, alpha layer, and "all" mipmaps) for all my textures.

Edited January 28, 2014 by cross1492

[IkeCoast]

Hey, Cross1492!

 

My, thank you for dropping by here. Yes, I know how to mask portions of the colormap to apply transparency or glow, but I didn't knew this one about the color of the pupil in the colormap. I'll give it a try, because everything else you mention in your explanation was already done. The thing is, my glowmap had the white portion covering JUST THE PUPIL, and everything else, the sclera and the iris, was pitch black. This nothwithstanding, in-game the eyes were glowing the opposite: the pupil pitch black, the irises bright orange or green depending on the emissive color of the nif file, and the sclera (black in the colormap but not pitch-black, like a "shaded black") had a faint corresponding glow. You can see what I'm talking about ir you look at my CMPartners Finlan and Nesure. The glowmap is pitch black for all the eye, complete white for just the pupil, but it's the irises what glow in their eyes (and the sclera, albeit slightly).

 

The logic would dictate that, since the pupil is pitch black and the mask of my glowmap covers everything else, the eyes should not glow at all.

 

Anyways, thank you very much for your advice, I really appreciate it.

 

Cheers!

[cross1492]

No problem at all. I hope it helps. :)

 

I'm a little bored today, so, I thought I would lurk around the forums today and see what kind of mischief I can get into. ;)

[DrakeTheDragon]

Of course it's also a matter of the diffuse map (=texture) how a glow map will work, as it's only 'blending' both maps, not overlapping. You cannot make a red dot appear inside a pitch black pupil only by using a glow map. It can only make existing parts of a texture glow, and when you shine light, no matter what color, on a pitch black surface, it will still remain pitch black.

 

My past experience however, was with glow maps only covering the iris. With Bloom this made only the iris glow, just as it should be, while after switching to HDR always the entire eye balls glow, as if disregarding the mere existance of a glow map.

 

A friend of mine recently informed me however, that for him glow maps actually do work with HDR, so it's not exactly an all-or-nothing issue with HDR alone. We're rather suspecting certain shader packages used by HDR but not by Bloom in this case now.

 

It's interesting to see that it's happening to you regardless of Bloom, HDR or none, though, but it could still very well be shader packages at fault here, considering the one used for the respective lighting mode is different on every other user's system. Maybe shooting some people a link to try it out for you will yield more interesting results? If you're already doing it alright and it's only impossible to have them working correctly 'on your system', this will definitely help you find out.

[IkeCoast]

Drake, thank you for dropping by!

 

Truth is, after releasing my Partners I cleaned my folders and looks like I deleted the experiments in the glowmapping.

 

I'll re-try it, and see what happens.

 

This is most likely a shader issue, but I suspect that the issue is not with my game, but rather with my old NVidia card. Looks like it handles shading in a different way than most modern ones.

 

While I'm a quite decent 3D modeller, I'm a total potato on texturing and never suspected that the diffuse map was the responsible of how the mesh glows. I believed the glowmap to be the only one to do that.

 

Cheers!