Skins Emissive/Glowing textures (how to ?)

Snaxist · Nov 7, 2021

Hello dear simracers/modders/livery makers.

I have been making my own liveries for quite some time, I always been happy with it. Then I saw people having liveries with glowing textures and a guy on Reddit told me he managed to make that only with the ex_config.ini file for CSP (no new mesh involved, so I imagine a texture file is called to be displayed above the default one).

I found this wiki. It explains a lot and I managed to make glow some meshes like the position LEDs on the sides of the BMW Z4 GTE by URD, change the headlight colour to yellow, and also make the rear like glow when the headlights are lit.

My question is, where can I find the documentation for the glowing textures ? I can't find anything whether on here or on Google. I've been searching for quite some time and no luck so far. And some people I've directly asked who had that kind of liveries never answered (feels like it's a well kept secret lol)

Or maybe someone who got a working example for his car could copy/paste the lines from his ext_config.ini ?

Thanks for your help and thanks for reading me and have a good day/evening,
Snax.

Stereo · Nov 7, 2021

Check out the extension\ext_config.ini file for the Subaru Impreza I made, its dashboard glow uses the shader. in summary gauge_illum.png is loaded into the txEmissive slot with SHADER=ksPerPixelMultiMap_emissive. Once you do that, the contents of that texture are used multiplicatively with the material's basic emissive setting. So if you have ksEmissive=1 1 1, and the texture's 255,255,0 on a given pixel, then you end up with emissive=1 1 0, ie. that pixel glows yellow.

If it's on the body of a car you'd need to add a lights section so the body lights up, but then most of your texture is black so it multiplies that emissive value by 0 and it looks the same as it originally did, with only the area you want to glow masked out in the lighting colour you want.

Snaxist · Nov 7, 2021

Thanks for your answer Stereo, I'l take a look and try a few things.

I'll get back if I have more questions or If I've managed to make something to show

I remember ksPerPixelMultiMap_emissive was explained a bit here. I think that'll help me understand what you did, thanks again !