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Self illumination channel


Skaven252
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Self illumination?  

36 members have voted

  1. 1. Would you find a self illumination channel useful?

    • Yes, absolutely.
      24
    • Sure, but only if it's easy to implement.
      6
    • I would need it only rarely.
      3
    • I don't think I would use it at all.
      3


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  • Advanced Member

This could, kind of sort of, be a feature request, but I thought I'd bring the topic up here before posting in the Feature Requests channel, just to discuss this.

3D-Coat textures already support color, bump/normal/dispacement and specularity channels. I was thinking, would it be useful if there was also support for a self illumination channel? It's not as widely used in games and rendering as color, bump and specularity are, but it would be useful for various glow-in-the-dark effects (lava, LEDs, what not).

So this is not really a "request" yet, just a thought. How much work would it be to implement? How many people here would find this useful?

It's not an absolute must for me, and it would introduce an additional degree of complication to the paint UI (one more material channel to worry about in addition to Color, Height and Specularity). Perhaps one way to do this without changing the UI would be to make an additional "Self Illumination" layer blend mode for the texture layers. If it was done that way, then the UI would not need to be changed so much, but it would also mean that you wouldn't be able to build materials with built-in self illumination maps.

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I'm not sure what is meant by Self Illumination. When I read it it sounds like a setting in a rendering preogram that says whether or not an object can cast light on itself. What I'm thinking you're talking about is (to use LightWave as an example) If you give a surface a high luminosity setting then render with radiosity, the luminous surface will cast light on other things. For example if you had a photo on a polygon and did the above it would look like a TV screen or hologram.

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I'm not sure what is meant by Self Illumination.

It's a map that determines how emissive the texture is. A self illuminated object "glows in the dark", quite literally. It doesn't cast light on other objects, it's just visible in an otherwise dark place.

Here is a good example of a self illuminated object. The glowing parts of the texture are determined by the self illumination map.

shader-SelfIllumDiffuse-0.jpg

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Oh yes it's what they call Luminosity in LW. here's a quiick example:

luminosity_xmpl.jpg

I can imagine that might be useful to some. I haven't done any work in games (though I want to) but I think I heard modern engines don't really use light maps like this any more. Maybe I'm wrong. It's hard to vote, because I would probably never use it, but some other people might so if it's easy to implement than it can only make 3DC better over all. I sure wouldn't mind having the option in case I did need it some day.

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I can see this being useful for LED's, displays, etc. This option would be nice to have, especially if the channel is integrated into the DX and GL shaders.

I use Carrara or Vue for rendering. Carrara has a glow channel in shader room that lets you achieve this, and it then lets you also create an aura around any glowing objects. Quite useful at times, but I would usually simply use a mask of the diffuse or similar.

Han't thought about 'painting' glow before, could be good.

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I dont know if this is really going to be useful in 3D coat but it could be cool. I mean self illumunation maps are used in a lot of new games in my opinion for example gears of war has loads of glowy blue bits http://media.teamxbox.com/wallpapers/gears_1920x1200.jpg and unreal engine 3 games in general use this effect quite a bit. My only concern is ...can 3D coat really display a low poly model with normal specular and colour map in as good a quality as the unreal 3 engine can?? I currently use xnormal to display my 3d game art http://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx it has a really nice little viewer! if 3D coat can display game models with the kind of quality xnormal can I would be really surprised.

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Yeah this would be great. Painting an emissive texture in real-time with a bloom shader would be very productive. If the shader worked either by blurring the total luminance cut-off, or just using the luminance of the emissive channel it would cover the common cases that a game engine would be using.

Also Mudbox 2009 has this ability (along with depth of field) if you're looking to be competitive :lol:

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My workflow routinely includes making emissive maps and I would be very happy to see it become a first-class channel like diffuse and specular. I was going to actually request this feature myself until I saw this thread :) While it would be great to have real time shader support for bloom & glow (among other things), just having basic single-pixel support for visualizing it would be enough for me to be quite pleased about it.

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  • 3 weeks later...
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My workflow routinely includes making emissive maps and I would be very happy to see it become a first-class channel like diffuse and specular. I was going to actually request this feature myself until I saw this thread :) While it would be great to have real time shader support for bloom & glow (among other things), just having basic single-pixel support for visualizing it would be enough for me to be quite pleased about it.

this & specular colour would be fantastic

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Emissive and Glossyness channels would be great.

Games have been using emmisive maps for a VERY long time its certainly nothing new. they are however very usefull

This would all be cool but it would be far more dynamic if the user could add channels on the fly setting type/depth (point3, 1bit 8bit etc) and tell the program which channel of the shader to apply it to. One could then for Instance use a custom GLSL shader from their Game and paint any given channel they want and see the results directly in the view.

Imagine a custom SSS Shader where you could paint the epi/sub/back scatter colours and weights and see it in the view.

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  • 2 years later...
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I know I'm late to the party but god yes Self-Illumination would be sweet, if it was there I can guarantee people be all over that creating all kinds of very very cool stuff.

Characters with glowing bits always look that much cooler :p

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I know I'm late to the party but god yes Self-Illumination would be sweet, if it was there I can guarantee people be all over that creating all kinds of very very cool stuff.

Characters with glowing bits always look that much cooler :p

It's definitely a missing element if you want to use the Renderer in 3D Coat. Plus, using the Applinks, it would be nice that when you send you model back, that an illumination/luminosity channel be sent to the proper map channel in the host app. So glowing eyes or elements of a model will have that channel exported directly to the self illumination map slot in Max...the incandescent map in Maya, Luminosity in LW, etc., etc.
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To me it appears that such an Self Illumination-Channel resulted only in another Grayscale-Image which then gets fed into your Renderer, no?

i think it would generally make more sense to get the option to add custom channels for certain effects and to name them accordingly.

That should be much more flexible - given that we all work on different things and all use different Renderers.

My preferrred Renderer for instance (Maxwell) doesn't use the Concept of Glossyness and also not of Self-Ilumination.

That said - I might need some Channels others may not have use for...

Every custom channel which either requires a Grayscale or a Colour-Map should be possible already or am I wrong?

So one could also draw a Subdermal Map or an Anisotropy Map for Metal with what 3DC already offers.

It was of course cool if one could copy an existing Channel, to display it "Solo" in the Viewport and to and modify it accordingly.

To me it doesn't seem realistic however that 3DC could render all these delicate custom effects in its Realtime Display though...

That would mean that 3DC would function like all Renderers available - at the same time.

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  • 7 months later...

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