Glow effect

The glow effect in OmegaEngine renders glowing elements separately, blurs them, and then composites them back onto the main Scene. This creates an effect of bright lights "bleeding" over edges.

Rendering passes

The glow effect uses a multi-pass rendering technique:

1. Main render - Render the scene normally
2. Glow render - Render the scene a second time to a separate texture capturing only glowing materials (GlowView)
3. Blur - Apply a blur shader to the glow map to create the bloom spread (PostBlurShader)
4. Composite - Add the blurred glow map on top of the main scene (PostGlowShader)

graph LR
    Scene --> MainRender[Main render]
    Scene --> GlowRender[Glow render]
    GlowRender --> Blur
    MainRender --> Composite
    Blur --> Composite
    Composite --> Final[Final image]

Setup

To enable the glow effect, call View.SetupGlow(). This automatically creates and registers the necessary views and shaders.

var view = new View(scene, camera)
{
    Name = "Main View",
    Lighting = true
};
engine.Views.Add(view);
view.SetupGlow(
    blurStrength: 3.0,
    glowStrength: 1.0
);

Marking objects as glowing

Objects contribute to the glow effect through their materials:

Glow color

Set the Glow color property on a material to make it glow. The color defines which color the object emits in the glow pass.

var model = new Model(XMesh.Get(engine, "Lamp.x"));
model.Materials[0].Glow = Color.Yellow;

Glow map

Use a GlowMap texture to define which parts of a model should glow and with what intensity. Bright areas in the glow map will appear in the glow pass.

var model = new Model(XMesh.Get(engine, "Lamp.x"));
model.Materials[0].GlowMap = XTexture.Get(engine, "LampGlow.png");