Tutorial: Self-Illumintaion (aka: Ship Glows) {Pic Intensive!} [Update: 7/16]

[Kirk]

It appears that there is a demand for a new ship glows tutorial now that BCU is gone. (You know what I mean.) I will be show casing a few methods I use for making ship's glow. (Note: Click the images for a larger image.)

Part I: Photoshop Only Method (Preferred for windows, etc. Not registry lighting, general lights, etc:)
First, open your texture file. We'll be using Wiley's Kelvin for this example.


Now, for the sake of learning I deleted the alpha channel (because some textures don't have one to start with.) To create an alpha channel in Photoshop CS4, just click the drop down menu in the "Channels" tab and click "New Channel." You will want to use the settings indicated in the picture.
(Note: The option to create a new channel is grayed out because the new channel dialogue box is open.)


Now we have a black alpha channel. Well, that simply won't do. A black alpha channel will simply yield no glows ingame. We'll have to add some.


What I tend to do, if I'm not making the texture myself from scratch, is copy the specific parts I want from the RGB channel and paste them into the alpha. Once they're there, I tweak them using brightness/contrast until I think it is about right (Keep in mind, the whiter the alpha, the brighter the glow.)


Now comes the part that I prefer to do in Max, making the registry lighting. You can do it in Photoshop, but I find it makes for an unrealistic result that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Ok, first we'll open up a new 1024x image.


I like to change the background color to a medium/dark gray before I render the light so that the background will be black after render.


Now to render the light! Don't worry about size for now. The main idea is to get it looking the way you want. We'll scale it down later.


All you have to do now is copy, paste, and scale/nudge to fit.


Volia! Home made glows!


Part II will be Photoshop/Max. Stay Tuned.

[Kirk]

Part 1.5: Editing Alpha channels in Corel Paint Shop Pro v7.02 (By Request)
Paint Shop 7.02 unfortunately does not support any sort of detailed alpha channel editing, but you can do some fairly basic stuff with it. Today we'll operate on the Aegian that came with KM 1.0.


First off, let's load the pre-existing alpha channel. Paint Shop allows you to define the alpha channel by what is selected. (Black or white, no room for gray. ) Here's the menu option.


And there's the alpha we're loading.


Ok, as you can (hopefully) see the areas of the alpha that are white have now been selected. Now we add and/or remove parts of this selection to get our desired glowing sections.


I'll just select the rest of the bussard and the impulse engines...


Now to save our selection as the alpha channel. (All of the selected area will be white in the alpha.)


And overwrite the original. (Don't forget to save the whole file afterward!)


There you are! Not the best editor in the world, but use it if you've got it!

[King Class Scout]

thanks.

note that, if you have this program, that there's no adjustment for the Alpha channel's brightness levels.

[Worf359Alpha]

Thx Kirk, ive been experimenting with glows and texturing using Paint.net, i would seem that paintshop would be a better program for both, although im happy so far with the results provided with Paint.net, im gonna look into getting P.S.P.
Keep up the great work.