Glowing Windows on a Starship!

[Reiko]

I converted a .3ds model into .cmod format and when I load it up in Celestia, all of the windows glow on the ship.
Anybody have any idea how this happened and how I might apply this to other models?







By the way the original .3ds model is from Jestr's Romulus and Remus pack.

[Reiko]

I figured out how to do it.

Here is the Enterprise from fungun's EarthOrbit addon. I added emissive textures to it and this is the result.

[fsgregs]

Reiko:

I know absolutely nothing about 3ds and CMOD modeling, so my question is from a novice standpoint. If I understand correctly, you added some "emissive textures" to the CMOD file, to get the windows to glow. They look great! There are probably 20 - 30 spacecraft models available for Celestia that have windows. Is this something that could be done to those existing 3ds or CMOD files? What kind of emissive textures did you use? How would one go about doing this?

Thanks in advance

Frank

[Reiko]

Reiko:

I know absolutely nothing about 3ds and CMOD modeling, so my question is from a novice standpoint. If I understand correctly, you added some "emissive textures" to the CMOD file, to get the windows to glow. They look great! There are probably 20 - 30 spacecraft models available for Celestia that have windows. Is this something that could be done to those existing 3ds or CMOD files? What kind of emissive textures did you use? How would one go about doing this?

Thanks in advance

Frank

I stumbled on it by accident. I can't seem to get them to work with 3ds models but with cmod they work like a charm. An emissive textures is the same as a night texture for a planet but they always glow even in sunlight.
What I did was take a texture for a ship and made a light map out of it. Here is an example

Original texture...




emissive texture..




In the cmod file just add the emissive texture by typing it in under the original texture.
Here is an example..

# ENTERPR(2) has 1 material(s)

material # 17

# diffuse 0.953 0.953 0.953
# diffuse weight 0.7 # Kd
diffuse 0.767 0.767 0.767
opacity 1
texture0 "Constit3_glow2.*" <--- texture

# specular 0.0235 0.0235 0.0235
# specular weight 0 # Ks
specular 0 0 0
specpower 2 # (roughness)*2.55
# emissive 1 1 1
# emissive weight 0.8 # Ke
emissive 0 0 0 # product
emissivemap "conlights2.*" <---emissivemap

end_material

[fsgregs]

Reiko:

Thanks for the explanation. Seems like it is not difficult. That leads to two questions:

1. How do you make a light map from an original texture? Is there a tutorial anywhere?

2. Are you aware of any tutorials on how to convert a 3ds mesh into a CMOD file?

Thanks again

Frank

[Reiko]

Reiko:

Thanks for the explanation. Seems like it is not difficult. That leads to two questions:

1. How do you make a light map from an original texture? Is there a tutorial anywhere?

2. Are you aware of any tutorials on how to convert a 3ds mesh into a CMOD file?

Thanks again

Frank

Go here for an explanation on how to convert 3ds to cmod
http://lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/m ... g.html#4.1

Or go here to get the 3ds to cmod converter. http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catal ... ities.html


As for the night textures there is no tutorial that I know of. What I did was load the texture in photoshop and adjusted the contrast to where only the lights were showing. Some parts I had to cut and paste and others had to paint the lights in by hand.