/Signed. I do like
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
 |
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Yes, Glowing Hair. No, that's not a typo. I didn't accidentally hit G instead of F.
This should be a simple solution to explain - I want to see hair options that look exactly like our existing hairs, but instead of shaders and textures, they consist of just one flat unshaded colour which is constantly bright, even in the dark. You know how the Resistance chest and gloves have those glowing lines? Like that, only over the entire surface of the hair. If you've noticed, we have a few "hair aura" options but, to be honest, they're not very good. A glowing hair model, by contrast, would look pretty cool, even if it loses surface shaping, especially on eldritch characters and aliens. I lack the photoshop skills (along with PhotoShop) to make a mock-up of this and such an idea is beyond simple pigg diving, so I don't have any reference pics, unfortunately. |
What, only hair?
I'd like to see a "Glowing" option for all costume parts, particularly for Tights patterns. Resistance gear and Mutant Pack options already prove that it's doable.
An easy way I see to do this would be to have the option apply to the primary/secondary colors for each costume piece. Put it under the color swatches, next to the "Link Colors" toggle button. When checked, it produces a slider bar so you can set how brightly you want that option's color to glow, from "noticeable in the dark" to "neon-bright."
Might be good to add a few options with this feature in mind.
Quote:
/signed.|
Originally Posted by JAG-01
What, only hair?
I'd like to see a "Glowing" option for all costume parts, particularly for Tights patterns. Resistance gear and Mutant Pack options already prove that it's doable. An easy way I see to do this would be to have the option apply to the primary/secondary colors for each costume piece. Put it under the color swatches, next to the "Link Colors" toggle button. When checked, it produces a slider bar so you can set how brightly you want that option's color to glow, from "noticeable in the dark" to "neon-bright." Might be good to add a few options with this feature in mind. |
I've been wanting some Tron-like effects for some time. This would do it.
131430 Starfare: First Contact
178774 Tales of Croatoa: A Rose By Any Other Name ( 2009 MA Best In-Canon Arc ) ( 2009 Player Awards - Best Serious Arc )
Quote:
The problem with making patterns glow is with how glows appear to be coded. A "glowing" area of a texture is actually baked into the base texture, itself, something that colour patterns can't do. If you look at the separate textures for, say, Organic Armour (and you shouldn't, since that's against the rules), you'll see that it has an entirely separate texture overlay with just the glowy bits on it.|
Originally Posted by JAG-01
I'd like to see a "Glowing" option for all costume parts, particularly for Tights patterns. Resistance gear and Mutant Pack options already prove that it's doable.
|
What all of the above means is that while we can have costume items with glowing bits on them, or indeed costume items that glow all over, we can't actually swap the areas that glow in real time. I assume that's what's kept us from getting "glowing colours," as I call them. One solution to this is what they've been using so far - only institute textures with SOME glowing parts and lock that glow to the secondary colour, but all that does is prevent you from using patterns.
In the case of hair, I'm suggesting just a full texture swap for a glowing one, so nothing will actually be left for the players to customize on the glow. The whole hair glows, you just pick the mesh, so WHERE it glows is predictable and can be written into the hair's base texture.
---
The same can actually be applied to skin. I'd suggest glowing skin in much the same way, but this will first require a tech swap to allow us to pick our base skin texture, which is what I believe is what David alluded to when he talked about "technical difficulties" with adding a muscular skin texture for women.
This does not, however, negate the existence of glowing tights, provided the ENTIRE tights glow irrespective of pattern. All colour patterns will be able to do is introduce areas of different-coloured glow. But that might still be enough.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
The problem with making patterns glow is with how glows appear to be coded. A "glowing" area of a texture is actually baked into the base texture, itself, something that colour patterns can't do.
|
I have some experience in computers and 3D modeling, and I can tell you this isn't necessarily true.
The "glow" is not "baked into" a texture on a computer-generated 3D model. The computer renders "glowing" or "full bright" textures by default. This is how a computer prefers to process graphics; solid, clean, and uniform.
What's "baked in" are actually the options governing shadows and lighting effects.
You can see this in action in the game; depending on how fast your graphics card is, you'll sometimes see walls and objects light up like a Christmas tree for about a second while the lighting effects finishing loading.
Quote:
| One solution to this is what they've been using so far - only institute textures with SOME glowing parts and lock that glow to the secondary colour, but all that does is prevent you from using patterns. |
If that were the case, your computer would have to redraw the pattern texture every time you moused over a new base option, causing your system to take a performance hit and possibly causing it to crash more often. More points of failure is BAD for any game, least of all an MMORPG with enough performance issues as it is.
The pattern graphics appear to be on their own layer rather than tied to the base texture. If that is true, then they could just copy the existing color patterns into new ones with the options for rendering shading and lighting effects turned off, then code them back into the game as normal pattern options.
From there, the player should be able to set how bright they want their costume to glow by simply selecting brighter or darker colors from the existing pallet. The closer the player gets to that color's "true" value, the brighter the costume pieces effected will appear to glow.
Quote:
You know? /signed.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Yes, Glowing Hair. No, that's not a typo. I didn't accidentally hit G instead of F.
This should be a simple solution to explain - I want to see hair options that look exactly like our existing hairs, but instead of shaders and textures, they consist of just one flat unshaded colour which is constantly bright, even in the dark. You know how the Resistance chest and gloves have those glowing lines? Like that, only over the entire surface of the hair. If you've noticed, we have a few "hair aura" options but, to be honest, they're not very good. A glowing hair model, by contrast, would look pretty cool, even if it loses surface shaping, especially on eldritch characters and aliens. I lack the photoshop skills (along with PhotoShop) to make a mock-up of this and such an idea is beyond simple pigg diving, so I don't have any reference pics, unfortunately. |
...if only because you pretty much kept the post down to around 2 short paragraphs...and such an option would be pretty snazzy.
Quote:
I invite you to take a look at what's in the pigg files and see if you can make more sense of it. We shouldn't be discussing that either way. It's against the forum rules.
|
Originally Posted by JAG-01
The "glow" is not "baked into" a texture on a computer-generated 3D model. The computer renders "glowing" or "full bright" textures by default. This is how a computer prefers to process graphics; solid, clean, and uniform.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
|
Well, my understanding of our costume parts that glow is that they're really a pseudo-glow in that they're flagged to just don't dim in darker settings. If you chose dark colors for these parts or are in a bright environment, they don't really appear to be glowing. This should be relatively easy to do (standard code rant appicable) if they wanted to go ahead with this.
Glows can also be fake with a particle aura attached to them that gives a bloom effect.
Real glows are light sources and actually bloom because light sources are set to automatically do that. Real glows light up other nearby textures. I'd imagine that would take new tech to enable.
Speeding Through New DA Repeatables || Spreadsheet o' Enhancements || Zombie Skins: better skins for these forums || Guide to Guides
Quote:
Unless Paragon found a way to do it differently than every other developer out there, the glow is going to be determined by what is known as an emissive or self illumination map (two names for the same thing). There's several different maps used for most materials in games; Diffuse (base color map and detailing), Specular(tells the game engine how lighting should affect the surface), Normal/Bump(Old school bump maps were greyscale, black is depressed areas, white is raised areas, shades of grey in between for gradiation between the two; Normal maps are the blueish based maps with pinks and purples and greens and yellows, very fun maps to work with), Emissive/Self Illumination(glow, as stated), Opacity (black and white or greyscale maps that tell the engine what parts are see-through/partially see-through), and there's a few more specialty maps (like Reflection/Cube maps for baked in reflections and some others). Greyscale or black and white maps don't need to be their own separate image file though since the alpha channel of another map is capable of holding that information. I think that's how they do Specular maps here; as the alpha channel of the Diffuse map.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I invite you to take a look at what's in the pigg files and see if you can make more sense of it. We shouldn't be discussing that either way. It's against the forum rules.
|
Not knowing exactly how things are done at Paragon, I assume that the emissive maps used here are black and white or greyscale maps, possibly included in one of the other maps as its alpha channel, where white is the glowing bits. Then we pick the color and the engine "multiplies" that color by the emissive map and we get the glow on the final piece. In material work, when you "multiply" a color by white you get the color; by black you get black. White is 1, black is 0. (edit: this multiplication deal is why, like Zombie Man said, if you choose a dark color for the glow, it won't appear to glow since it will be closer to black)My guess is that if it appears that there is no map for the emissive, it is using the alpha channel from one of the other maps.
All that technical stuff out of the way, I'd get behind this suggestion. Glowing hair, skin, tights, and patterns would all be very cool.
@Johnstone & @Johnstone 2
ediblePoly.com
All my characters
By the way, I REALLY don't have any reference pics, unless I go rip one out of the game which originally inspired me to post this and have two reasons to get banned For this reason, I'd like to ask anyone who may have reference pics of seriously glowing hair, either found or self-made, to please post them so we can have some examples.
"Glowing hair" seems to be a suspiciously absent thing even on Google Search, and this is the same search which turns up oddles of reference pics when searching for, say, "slime girl" (with Safe Search obviously disabled), so I'm not sure what to think.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
|
Okay, technical BS aside, bottom line: glowing costume parts is doable and much desired.
.jpg)
A "glowing tights" set, basically like the current plain tights but doesn't dim in shadowy areas, would be awesome. You could play around with dark and light areas and create all sorts of effects.
I think in general, it would be nice to get less full sets and more generic pieces that can be used for many different effects.
Character index
Quote:
That's not glowing hair. That's the aneurysm aura.
|
Originally Posted by Xzero45
 |
Speeding Through New DA Repeatables || Spreadsheet o' Enhancements || Zombie Skins: better skins for these forums || Guide to Guides
Quote:
Technicalities aside, I should probably have included this in the the original post, as well. Glowing tights could make for some very cool designs, especially if they come without much shading, as glowing bits on costume pieces tend to. We could pass them off as "pure energy," so to speak, and make our divine characters even better.|
Originally Posted by Silver Gale
A "glowing tights" set, basically like the current plain tights but doesn't dim in shadowy areas, would be awesome. You could play around with dark and light areas and create all sorts of effects.
|
The reason I focus on hair is because actual glowing hair (and not just glow-in-the-dark) tends to give people a very unreal, supernatural feel in a way that glowing bodies don't often manage to accomplish. We tend to perceive people through their faces - and hair is part of a face's appearance - and when you mess with these, the effects can be quite powerful... When they're not quite disturbing.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Zombie Man
That's not glowing hair. That's the aneurysm aura.
|
Both of those are from Oban: Star Racers, yes, and both of them do a fairly good job of presenting a divine-looking being in pretty stark, if stylised imagery. THAT is kind of like what I want. Notice how none of the light has any shading on it. Because it's light. Light doesn't reflect light any more so than fire casts a shadow... Wait, what?
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
The reason I focus on hair is because actual glowing hair (and not just glow-in-the-dark) tends to give people a very unreal, supernatural feel in a way that glowing bodies don't often manage to accomplish.
|
Or, for scifi buffs such as yours truly...
Quote:
| The reason I focus on hair is because actual glowing hair (and not just glow-in-the-dark) tends to give people a very unreal, artificial feel in a way that glowing bodies don't often manage to accomplish. |
Glowing hair, yes. Marry this to a Hair Aura FX and then it can be moving and glowing.
Why Blasters? Empathy Sucks.
So, you want to be Mental?
What the hell? Let's buff defenders.
Tactics are for those who do not have a big enough hammer. Wisdom is knowing how big your hammer is.
I would totally dig this option, give us some cool glow options! Preferably hair (or 'streaks' in the hair), and better eye glowing options w/o auras.
Also having some/all of the selectable costume patterns being able to glow would be neat too, as well as certain doodads on costume pieces (like the visors on the Cybrog/Vanguard sets, etc).
While we're dreaming, I'd love to have the 'reflective' option on most every piece as well. We have it on a few shoulder pads/belts, and some tech armors come built-in with a reflecty-look (in Ultra-mode), but I'd love to be able to toggle that on/off on any piece I wanted.
(I actually thought this was coming with GR, as they mentioned something along the lines of reflectivity options for armors..)
Yes, Glowing Hair. No, that's not a typo. I didn't accidentally hit G instead of F.
This should be a simple solution to explain - I want to see hair options that look exactly like our existing hairs, but instead of shaders and textures, they consist of just one flat unshaded colour which is constantly bright, even in the dark. You know how the Resistance chest and gloves have those glowing lines? Like that, only over the entire surface of the hair.
If you've noticed, we have a few "hair aura" options but, to be honest, they're not very good. A glowing hair model, by contrast, would look pretty cool, even if it loses surface shaping, especially on eldritch characters and aliens.
I lack the photoshop skills (along with PhotoShop) to make a mock-up of this and such an idea is beyond simple pigg diving, so I don't have any reference pics, unfortunately.