emmisive/glow map

[A_GAME]

Hey I am trying to get the effect of rays of light shining through the cracks in my barn, and i does not seem to work in high quality lighting. I tried applying a glow map, but it only works in render mode. Is there any way to get this effect in high quality lighting mode in the viewport?
1.render
2.low quality
3.high quality

[A_GAME]

I think I figured it out. In addition to adding a colored alpha, you add an incandescence map. Anywhere on the map that is black will be black and anything else will be that color regardless of the lighting situation. Its good for sunrays and things that light up. I have included both my map, and the results.

[Amad]

Incandescence is definitely cool to have at your disposal. I haven't found anything that supports actual glow effects in real time, however. I've heard rumor that there are some plugins for shaders that might work, but other than that I think we're stuck with either rendering or importing into an engine that supports glow fx.

[rburke]

yeah you can add the light to the incandescence channel on a second uv set and bake in any sort of crazy lighting you want. You could also add it into a layered texture instead of using incandescence, which sometimes looks odd in maya. But your on the right track in unreal you would apply to the incandescence channel of the shader.to get that effect.

[rburke]

oh and yeah actual glow cannot be displayed in maya viewport by maya shaders. Glow is general rendered in a second pass over the regular render pass. There are a few workarounds. One is the cgfx shader plugin which can create these glows but its not easy. Another is a software called Turtle which is becoming a standard in the industry for realtime lighting. It can do all sorts of great stuff in the maya viewport but it uses a visualization shader too. So getting it directly in maya can be next to impossible. You could always create a transparent type shader that goes on a slightly ballooned geometry and have it setup to only glow around the edges not facing the camera, "fresnel falloff". Or just pop it into the unreal engine and do whatever the hell you want.