Illumination maps

Scripting Issues
1

Does Panda3d support illumination maps?

I am currently using the emissive characteristic in the mesh to create engine and weapon glows in my models.

2

It does, but you have to write a shader. Have you seen the glow shader demo in the tutorials?

David

3

Thanks David. After reading up about the shading system, it looks like it is overkill for making window, engine and weapon illumination on the models.

I assume that the use of shaders is the only way to create glow effects.

4

You could do this instead:

  • Put the illumination map in the alpha channel.
  • Render the model once without transparency.
  • Render the model a second time with 100% ambient lighting plus alpha-blending.

Of course, rendering a model a second time is a tad tricky. Something to do with sort bins and all that, I’m not entirely sure.

5

i don’t think this will give a nice glow Josh, I in my game it works very well when it does work. I just used the tron demo and some extra modifications.