How do glow shaders work in FO4? Tried many things, copied mods, all fail.

[fadingsignal]

*** SOLVED: See below ***

 

Being fairly advanced, I feel completely stupid at this point. I spent two hours trying to make a button glow, started over several times from scratch, copied vanilla meshes/materials/textures that glow, down to every setting, material value, texture, and they all fail to work in game.

 

I can either make the entire mesh emit a glow, or not at all. None of the masks work.

 

Using Red Rockets Glare (makes the red rocket signs glow) as a basis for structure on another vanilla mesh also yielded nothing. From everything I see, simply checking the GLOW flag in the BGSM material and setting the path to the glow mask, then setting an emit color does the trick, but no dice. Like I said I went beyond that and put all of the glow/texture values and settings directly in my NIFs too and none of it worked.

 

I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I can make FO4 do anything but a stupid glow, lol.

[PoliteRaider]

All I can offer is reassurance that you're not on crazy pills. I tried doing the same thing with copying the techniques and just sort of backed away quietly and ashamed when I couldn't get glow maps to work. Glad to see I'm not the only one and that someone of your skill level has trouble with it makes me feel slightly less embarrassed at failing.

 

Sorry I don't have an answer, but at least you know you're not the only person looking for one.

[fadingsignal]

I somehow made it work, I just started fidgeting with every bloody value. Now that I know I'm not out of my mind, I'm going back and writing down the steps.

[PoliteRaider]

I somehow made it work, I just started fidgeting with every bloody value. Now that I know I'm not out of my mind, I'm going back and writing down the steps.

 

I'm glad you got it sorted out. If you do manage to get the steps down I'd love to hear how you managed it (when and if you get the time, of course).

 

First time I couldn't get it working I thought I was trying something too advanced (playing around with mixing glass effects and glow maps) but then later on I couldn't even get it working on a simple mesh without making the whole thing glow. I'll probably give it another try soon, although at the moment I'm charging at a different windmill.

[mm137]

I think the "use environmental reflection" (or whatever it's called) check box was what got me. It needs to be unchecked.

[fadingsignal]

Yeah I'm pretty sure that I was trying to use environment mapping AND glow mapping at the same time, and was mixing up values between the NIF and the Material after fiddling with it for so long. Ignoring all the mesh data, and purely using the material file it's fairly straight forward.

[fadingsignal]

 

I'm glad you got it sorted out. If you do manage to get the steps down I'd love to hear how you managed it (when and if you get the time, of course).

 

Here's the gist of it, please feel free to hit me up with questions if you'd like more help:

1. Ignore the NIF except to get the path of the Material BGSM file. Most everything takes place in the Material now, even the shader type (env map, glow map, etc.), which I didn't realize.
2. Open the BGSM file using Material Editor (converting to JSON using Gibbed Tools doesn't show you all the options and isn't as easy as using checkboxes)
3. Make sure that under General > Environment Mapping is unchecked; you can't do both on the same mesh, unfortunately
4. Under Material make sure Emittance Enabled is checked, and set the Emittance Color to be the color of the glow you want. You CAN just set this to white, and control the glow color with your texture, but it's way easier and less hard drive space to control the glow color from inside these tiny BGSM files.
5. Drop the emittance multiplier down to 0.5 or it will be a full-blown primary color.
6. Open up the diffuse texture that you want to add glow to, make a copy of it, desaturate it to black and white, and paint everything BLACK except the area you want to glow. I do this because if you just paint a white block where you want it to glow, there won't be any nuance to the glow, it'll literally be just a flat color. Make it bright and contrasty. Here was my end result: http://i.imgur.com/ljljg5f.jpg
7. Save this as NameOfYourTexture_g.dds
8. In the Material file, make sure the Environment Map Texture path is cleared out
9. Put your new _G.dds file into the Glow Texture path
10. Make sure your mesh is pointing to the new material in the NIF, or that you're using a material swap record (easy to forget that part)

Last thing: I use Material Swaps on everything, because it's way more efficient and flexible than copy/pasting a whole mesh and changing the material path. However, for some reason, the Goggles refused to swap materials, and I could not figure out why, which was making my testing all the more confusing. I have material swaps on HUNDREDS of things in my load order that I've made, but that one stupid thing wouldn't budge. Keep that in mind when you're testing and using material swaps.

 

Cheers

[mm137]

I had some material swaps not work either - in vanilla the Glowing Mutant Hound and Glowing Behemoth just use normal textures with no glow, and would not accept material swaps at all for some reason.

[PoliteRaider]

 

In the Material file, make sure the Environment Map Texture path is cleared out

 

 

Oh... I'm pretty certain this is where I was going wrong.

 

Thankyou for your help, I'll give this a try soon.