Advanced Member Skaven252 Posted January 3, 2009 Advanced Member Report Share Posted January 3, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philnolan3d Posted January 4, 2009 Report Share Posted January 4, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Skaven252 Posted January 4, 2009 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted January 4, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philnolan3d Posted January 4, 2009 Report Share Posted January 4, 2009 Oh yes it's what they call Luminosity in LW. here's a quiick example: 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member 3DArtist Posted January 5, 2009 Advanced Member Report Share Posted January 5, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Ghostdog Posted January 5, 2009 Advanced Member Report Share Posted January 5, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member GED Posted January 6, 2009 Advanced Member Report Share Posted January 6, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member David Walters Posted January 6, 2009 Advanced Member Report Share Posted January 6, 2009 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: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Eric Cosky Posted January 8, 2009 Member Report Share Posted January 8, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Unleashed Posted January 30, 2009 Member Report Share Posted January 30, 2009 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Roger_K Posted January 30, 2009 Advanced Member Report Share Posted January 30, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member PoopaScoop Posted July 14, 2011 Advanced Member Report Share Posted July 14, 2011 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted July 14, 2011 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted July 14, 2011 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. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member ace63 Posted July 16, 2011 Member Report Share Posted July 16, 2011 this & specular colour would be fantastic THIS! We definitely need specular color aswell! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Guedin Posted July 19, 2011 Member Report Share Posted July 19, 2011 I would rather prefer a way to work on glossiness instead, cause without gloss map, I can't work my spec map correctly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member polyxo Posted July 19, 2011 Advanced Member Report Share Posted July 19, 2011 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Rhino Posted February 27, 2012 Member Report Share Posted February 27, 2012 I would like to chuck in a vote for an Illumination channel. Coming from Mudbox, the Illumiation channel was very useful for game assets creation. As far as I can tell, 3D Coat surpasses Mudbox in all other respects apart from this one tiny detail! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Javis Posted February 27, 2012 Report Share Posted February 27, 2012 I think along with illumination and gloss channels, coloured spec is on the top of my list of wants. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member b33nine Posted February 27, 2012 Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 27, 2012 I would also very much like a glow channel/map option. It would be great for illustration work as well as production work that requires glow maps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member wailingmonkey Posted February 28, 2012 Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 28, 2012 would be a great addition to have all 3 (as geothefaust suggests)...it's got my vote since 2009. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member artruder Posted February 28, 2012 Member Report Share Posted February 28, 2012 Emissive Materials in UDK looks like: http://artruder.com/prop-demo usefull for mechanic things - about two year ago i created a prop object and the result with emessive map the two flashing lights ^^ yeah its can be animated as well Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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