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Anyone know how to animate glow maps?


doctorhr2

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I've been Googling but haven't found an answer... Does anyone know what commands are needed in Nifskope to control the behaviour of a glow map? For instance, If I wanted to make a glow map on a window switch on and off at a particular time, or make a light pulse on and off... Any suggestions? Nifs I could check out? Any help much appreciated.
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Animated textures in Skyrim are kinda funky... Maybe take a look at torch in meshes/weapons/torch/. There is a node called GlowAddMesh which seems to just use a glow map? If so you can add a bseffectshaderpropertyfloatcontroller to the bseffectshaderproperty for that node (the thing that defines which glow map to use) and then animate the alpha channel. All I know how to do right now is making a looping animation so it could do a pulse, duno about switching at particular times. An example of using bseffectshaderpropertyfloatcontroller can be found in meshes/effects/fxfirewithembers01. There is actually a lot of useful stuff in meshes/effects so I suggest poking around there.

 

for bseffectshaderpropertyfloatcontroller you need to tell it what bseffectshader you want to animate and which property of that bseffectshader you want to animate (target variable). If you mouse over the floatcontroller it will show you which numbers are mapped to which property. Also note the tooltips are sometimes wrong (I guess someone is reverse engineering them? Haven't really looked into it). This means that it could be possible that there is a number which will let you animate the glow map alpha directly without needing to create a separate node, I don't really know. The floatcontroller also needs an interpolator to define which values to use to animate the property. Notice some floatcontrollers have more floatcontrollers as children and I believe this allows you to animate multiple properties at once.

 

Pretty haphazard explanation but I think it should give you a decent start...

 

Edit: actually it sounds like you want to make something like windows glowing at night or something of that sort. In that case I think you will have to use the CK and scripting to swap glow maps/models. I don't have much experience with the CK so I don't know its exact capabilities.

Edited by hamseungyeon
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Animated textures in Skyrim are kinda funky... Maybe take a look at torch in meshes/weapons/torch/. There is a node called GlowAddMesh which seems to just use a glow map? If so you can add a bseffectshaderpropertyfloatcontroller to the bseffectshaderproperty for that node (the thing that defines which glow map to use) and then animate the alpha channel. All I know how to do right now is making a looping animation so it could do a pulse, duno about switching at particular times. An example of using bseffectshaderpropertyfloatcontroller can be found in meshes/effects/fxfirewithembers01. There is actually a lot of useful stuff in meshes/effects so I suggest poking around there.

 

for bseffectshaderpropertyfloatcontroller you need to tell it what bseffectshader you want to animate and which property of that bseffectshader you want to animate (target variable). If you mouse over the floatcontroller it will show you which numbers are mapped to which property. Also note the tooltips are sometimes wrong (I guess someone is reverse engineering them? Haven't really looked into it). This means that it could be possible that there is a number which will let you animate the glow map alpha directly without needing to create a separate node, I don't really know. The floatcontroller also needs an interpolator to define which values to use to animate the property. Notice some floatcontrollers have more floatcontrollers as children and I believe this allows you to animate multiple properties at once.

 

Pretty haphazard explanation but I think it should give you a decent start...

 

Edit: actually it sounds like you want to make something like windows glowing at night or something of that sort. In that case I think you will have to use the CK and scripting to swap glow maps/models. I don't have much experience with the CK so I don't know its exact capabilities.

 

 

Thank you both for your responses. I can get glow mapping to work, just wasn't sure how one went about animating it. Hamseungyeon, I will follow your suggestions and have a look at those properties. I didn't realise that you could script glow maps in CK, so that gives me another potential avenue. If I find anything of use, I'll post.

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