[LE] How to add a glow map to malebody_1 mesh

[morrowind1979]

I am trying to make a boss NPC that has glowing symbols all over his body but I cant figure outhow to get the glow mapto work properly on the malebody_1 mesh. I have added glow maps to armor and weapons without any problems but it doesnt seem to work on body meshes. Does anyone know how to do this?

[nerdofprey]

I'm guessing you would need to add a separate BSLightingShaderProperty with its own shader type and texture paths. Another (maybe easier?) way to do it would be to duplicate the body object, scale it up ever so slightly, and make it a transparent overlay with glow effects.

[DeathMotif]

Yeah. I could tell you how to do it on armor and weapons, but I'm not sure how it would work on body meshes. I'd recommend looking at other NPC's (such as deathclaws) that have glowing body materials and seeing how they are done. I suspect you may need a custom mesh that has two copies of the male mesh. The first mesh being the base layer, and the second being the glow layer. Given that your glowing symbols are likely a transparency effect, you'd want the second layer set up for transparency in nifskope. I used this approach with my remod of the Kerrigan Bodysuit. Check out the mesh, and you will see what I mean. Let me know if this works for you.

[morrowind1979]

Thanks for the replies Sounds slightly complicated but I will give it a bash. Previously I removed the BSlightingshadr branch from thebody mesh and copied a BSlighting shader property from an armor that had a glowmap but that just resulted in the whole body glowing instead of just the glow map lol

[nerdofprey]

You can't really remove and replace the original shader, you have to add another somehow. You need the standard shader property on there to get the skin to look right, it is a skin-specific shader and it's set up to change skin tone based on your NPC record among other things.

 

I know from building my Briarheart mod - which has a pulsing glow effect on the briar in their chest as well as a working glow map - it is possible to layer two shader properties on one shape in a body mesh. I don't really remember how I did it, though, haha... I remember looking at a lot of other people's meshes to see how they did stuff. I do know that one shader property is set up as the controller of the other, though.

 

I don't know if you have tried just literally adding a glow flag to the existing shader property... I feel like it won't work right without being a glow-type shader instead of skin-type.

 

I swear I have seen NPC's with glowing tattoos on the nexus before, so I know it can be done, but I never downloaded those mods to see how they worked.

 

EDIT:

Boom, right here, glowing runes on the body! Hopefully if you download that mod you can back-engineer it without too much trouble.

Edited September 28, 2017 by nerdofprey

[morrowind1979]

Thanks!