Weapon Glow Questions

[Himperion]

Well, i'm trying to make a weapon glow that follows the blade from the model in the screenshot. I known that this involve billboarded bones, but i can't find a tutorial that explain how to make a "clean" glow that covers and follow the movement of the weapon during animations.

Any explanation of how this works, will be really appreciated.

 

[GhostWolf]

Those are in fact many small billboarded quads.
Add a billboarded node that is a child of your blade node (or hand, or whatever you have), offset it so it sits on the blade where you want to, and make it a team glow quad, that's really all there is to it.

 

[Himperion]

Thanks, but my problem is that i don't understand how to find the right position for the billboarded bones, or really how billboard works ingame.



For example every quad needs to be attached to on a bone. But the skeleton for the glow needs to be in the middle of the mesh, or it need to cover the weapon from the sides.

Something else, In the case of the Blademaster the glow isn't billboarded but "Locked on Y" what is difference with a normal billboard.

 

[Freddyk]

You need one bone for each quad, and you have to put these bones at the center of each quad.

Theoretically, setting a bone to billboard will simply make it turn its X axis towards the camera.

 

[A.R.]

I'm not 100% on this but in general terms:

Billboarding forces the bone (and any mesh attached to it) to always face the camera. For the Blademaster, the "Locked on Y" means that rotation is constrained around the Y axis of the sword bone. Instead of having many smaller glowing planes, it uses one long one. When you look at the sword in an unanimated position, you see that it's horizontal and facing sideways. This is the native rotation of that particular bone, which sets the Y axis for the billboarded plane.

You might need to play around with it a bit (and check it in-game, because the viewer bugs out a little) to get it to work right.

 

[Hermit]

Thanks, but my problem is that i don't understand how to find the right position for the billboarded bones

Every quad needs to be attached to it's own billboarded bone (as you already said), so the first thing you need to do is move the glow to where you want it to be on the weapon. Then go to Bones tab of the Sequence editor, select all 4 vertices (edges) of one of the squares and click Create-->Bone. A new bone will appear right in the center of the glow. It needs to be in the center, or else the billboarded glow won't work right. Attach the glow to the created bone(s), and you're done.

You might need to play around with it a bit (and check it in-game, because the viewer bugs out a little) to get it to work right.

Yes, since most, if not all, viewers don't display billboarded glows correctly, the only way to tell if you made it right is to test the model in World Editor or in game.

 

[Himperion]

Ok, for something that doesn't sound that dificult in theory is a pain to made it work properly. The model alternate animations use the Billboard Lock method with a very long glow.

What do you think about it.