Painting glowing areas or "luminance"?

[Rkhane]

I wanted to be able to paint/create glowing areas on my models. For instance sci-fi armor, having little glowing lights on it here and there that show up in the Render Room.

I found a video where someone pulls it off here:

 

Looking at it, they paint on a normal layer at first, set to Standard Blend. They paint the base color for the lights on that layer. Then they create a second layer above it, set it to Normal Map and when they paint on it it basically has a "glow in the dark" effect. When they preview in the Render Room the areas glow like glow in the dark paint. I would love  to be able to do this but was unable to re-create the result.

 

Maybe he has different layers/maps then I do.

 

I just paint directly on the high poly model in Paint Room. Any thoughts help to be able to paint neon/glowing effects without creating textures/maps etc? I would love this!

Edited October 22, 2014 by Rkhane

[Carlosan]

Hi!

 

This video demonstrates the usage of Specular Color and Emissive (Glow) Maps in 3D Coat

 

[Rkhane]

Tried it but it didn't work for me?

So I have the armor in surface mode, went to paint room, have the armor paint on its own layer (layer 0 is turned off), made a new layer, painted the blue stripes, set to Emissive, got the results below. Also tried it with layer 0 turned on, no difference. Any thoughts ideas?

Edited October 22, 2014 by Rkhane

[Carlosan]

Use some layer as a glow or specular color and export them separately.

[AbnRanger]

Are you painting this on a high-poly model in the (Voxel) Sculpt Room, or a low poly, UV'ed mesh in the Paint Room? I've never tried to use glow (Emissive) on a high-poly sculpt, so I'm not sure if there is a major difference, but in any case, I would try to use a brighter color. I have a hunch that 3D Coat uses the lighter values to essentially blow out the exposure, if you will...to create the glow effect. If your color value is on the darker side of the scale, then you might not get much of a glow effect.

 

When you export the low-poly mesh from the Paint Room, there will be a check-box to export an Emissive map (same for Colored Specularity), and it will create a separate map just for glow. You can plug that into your luminance or self illuminating channel in your host app

[Rkhane]

I was painting directly on the high poly mesh. It is in surface mode. Whenever I try and paint in Voxel mode it automatically changes to Surface mode in the paint room after applying the first brush stroke. So I make sure all the objects are in surface mode before painting them. One interesting note, when I paint on a new paint layer, it changes the mesh/object to voxel mode without asking. When I paint a voxel mesh on Layer 0 in the paint room (layer 0 for some reason cannot be deleted), it asks if I would like to bake the model first.

 

Currently I just do direct on high poly mesh painting then render it out in the render room. I do not need the work in any other program so currently I don't autopo/retopo/UV/bake export etc. Although I am currently trying to figure out the process via Autopo so rendering 360 turnarounds will be much faster.