Hopper, as always you're a great help when it comes to explanation.
Hopper wrote:You have to put it in a dark area to see the effect. Without glow, an object can be lit anywhere from 0.0 to 1.0, depending on the polygon and miner's lights; with glow, it'll be lit between minimum_glow_intensity and 1.0. If the ambient lighting is greater than minimum_glow_intensity, you won't see the glow effect.
I tested out the lamp in a room with lights at 20, and 15 as well as the previous 0. For some reason, even with just the bare minimum of a normal map, it's still rather bright in those dark rooms. Not sure why. I'm compiling a plugin with the new lamp so other people can play with it, and maybe someone can figure out why this is.
Hopper wrote:There is one reason to use a low minimum_glow_intensity, though:
If you're talking about the way the light from the bulb spills over onto the frame of the lamp in your second shot, that's just how bloom works: it's caused by lens imperfections, so it's a 2D phenomenon and 3D occlusion doesn't enter into it. If you're talking about how to set up the glow mask and how it affects bloom, let me clarify what should be feasible.
You can repurpose the glow mask as a bloom mask instead, to create an object that doesn't necessarily glow but does bloom only in parts. With a minimum_glow_intensity of zero, the object will not light up a dark room, but anything in the glow image/mask will bloom according to glow_bloom_scale and glow_bloom_shift. With normal_bloom_scale and normal_bloom_shift left at zero, only what's in the glow mask will contribute to the bloom effect. The bloom would vary according to the object's ambient lighting, of course.
I did manage to use the glow mask as a bloom mask, since the only parts of the map lit up in the glow map correspond to the faces involved in the fluorescent tube. It looks pretty good. I guess my real problem was as mentioned above, where although the glow mask obviously was limited to the fluorescent tube due to the bloom only occurring there, the whole lamp seemed to disregard the lighting settings of the polygon it resides in. This has caused some confusion for me.
Hopper wrote:For this model, I'd expect a glow map with full intensity on the bulb itself, a less strong glow on the papers (to fake the transmission/reflection from the bulb) and a slight glow on the shiny white surfaces (again to fake the reflection). Only the glow surfaces would bloom, and you could use glow_bloom_shift to confine that to the bulb itself. You could turn down minimum_glow_intensity a bit to allow for flickering, but for a light turned all the way off, I suspect swapping the scenery is the only way to get a good-looking result. After all, an inactive fluorescent bulb has a very distinctive look, very different from the way it looks when on. For a completely shaded lamp, a minimum_glow_intensity of zero might be acceptable, although in low-light situations the miner's light and muzzle flashes will cause the light to look like it's on.
Your suggestions here are great. I think what I'll do is just have a separate scenery assigned to the "dead" sequence for that lamp. That way, I can toggle it with Lua just by swapping out the scenery type. Of course, if it really gets shot, then I'll have to have some way to make sure it can't "turn on", or I can just depend on a healthy suspension of disbelief and hope for the best. Either way, I really appreciate your thinking on this issue.
Now I just have to figure out why even when there's just a normal map, the thing looks bright as ever in a poly with lights at 20.
As a reply to your second post, I just switched over all my settings to type="obj", which broke everything at first, until I realized I had been working around the bugs with type="wave" by flipping my texture maps and rotating every object on the x-axis to compensate. Now that I've cleared that up, everything works pretty smoothly. Not having to flip my texture maps is nice. In Blender, when I export to .obj, by default it rotates the object to match up with the "correct" orientation, so it's one less thing I have to worry about when I'm crafting scenery and items.
Again, thanks!
