If this is a ridiculously difficult question to answer, I apologise, I''m just looking through a few demos and noting its absence... but it seems like the sort of thing that shouldn''t be too hard to do... How would one go about creating an object which actually radiates light (presumably decaying gradually around it over some set distance back to the ambient level) - instead of the illumination only being visible by its effect on other objects? Like a will-o-the-wisp or a candle-flame... -- Mercy

I think that kind of thing is typically done by blending a "light flare" type texture around the object. That''s how I''ve seen it done in the past, and it''s a pretty good effect.

My thoughts would be to re-render the object into a texture, and then blend that texture over the top of the scene as a post-process effect (use ortho). Making the texture quite low res and enabling filtering on it would automatically add a fading effect as well, for free. Not sure about it''s performance overhead, however.

The idea of using a lens flare texture is a nice one... I shall have to try this...
Let me show my n00b-ness again and ask what is "ortho"?

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Mercy

Check out NVIDIA''s developer website for some articles on rendering glow effects. That''s really what you''re looking for, and the techniques they describe look really good.

U can use an emissive material color on the object itself, and maybe add a lens flare

I was just reading about GL_EMISSION, can someone give me a bit more detail on how to use it?

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Mercy

GL_EMISSION is just a material property like GL_AMBIENT or GL_DIFFUSE and it''s used exactly the same way. This property is basically adding color that isn''t affected by light.

... hmm.
Sorry, now I''m more confused o.o
I thought GL_DIFFUSE and GL_AMBIENT were properties of a light?
I''m still working my way through the first couple dozen Nehe tutorials - the ones where Delphi code is available - so maybe this is hideously wrong...?

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Mercy

I'm not so sure about this on OpenGL's point-of-view (it's most likely the same), but in raytracing, diffuse light is the measure which describes the relation between incident (the light that falls on a surface) and excident (the light that leaves a surface). In a nutshell, diffuse describes the intrinsic brightness of a surface/body. Ambient light is the base brightness of a surface/body.

By default you have your light which has a certain color and doesn't change as it is reflected off a surface/body. Emission allows you to add a supplemental component that describes the sufrace's/body's color.

This adds up to something like this (off the top of my head):

eye_brightness = incident_brightness * surface_diffuse + surface_ambient (+ env_ambient)

[edited by - crispy on August 18, 2003 9:35:46 AM]