How do I make parts of a texture map glow?

[Tumerboy]

It's been a while since I've textured in Max, but there should be a self illumination slot someplace.

All you need is a luminocity map. basically an alpha of the windows. the rest of the texture black, and the windows whatever shade of grey represents how bright they're glowing.

I hope that helps, hopefully someone with max knowledge can give you better guidance.

[Chris]

theres a few ways to make materials glow, but you will probably be limited in the end to the requrements of your game engine.

You can assign parts of a texture a unique 'Material ID' - which will get passed through to post - either through the 'render effects' or 'video post'. So in this instance you could make a black & white mask of where the windows will be & use it as the mask for a blend material. This would enable you to create 2 sub-materials, one for the building & one for the windows. Then assign the window material a material ID & assign the render effect 'Glow'. This will render a glow, but only for pre-rendered cutscenes, it will not glow in a game engine.

Probably the best way for real time graphics would be to incorporate the glow into a light map (if the game engine supports such maps). This would be a strictly 2d effect, simulating the bloom effect of a glowing object on the areas around the windows. For this you could simply take your map used for the walls, change it so the walls are black & the windows are white. Apply a gaussian blur to it so the white areas bloom out & assign the map to the self illumination slot as Tumorboy suggested.

if the game engine does not support light maps, you could maybe photoshop the diffuse map, brightening a small area around the windows - to give the impression of a halo of light?

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