Hey, I'm having some trouble with textures again, this time specifically glow maps. This seems to be a very difficult topic, or perhaps one I'm simply over-thinking.

I've created an entirely new race with special textures (though the default Imperial head), and I want to make it look really special with glow mapped tattoos and eyes. The eyes work great, and all I did was add eye_g.dds to the folder that eye.dds was in.

But now I want to make the tattoos glow. Without complicating this post with things I've tried, I want to start fresh. Is there any way I can make a proper glow-map for a character's skin?

How are the tattoos applied? Are they built in to the base texture, or added in the same way as the age wrinkles, with an overlaid texture? I suspect that a glow map would only be possible on the base texture.

They are built into the base texture so whereas most of the skin is dark grey, there are blue tattoos.

Unfortunately glow maps on body meshes are not going to work without some means of workaround.

You might know for glow maps to work the material property of the mesh the map is applied on has to have its "emissive" value set to something else than black, I guess white would be ideal but not the only possible value of course. Anyways, due to the game-engine controlling, and thus overriding, all properties of the material "skin" it won't ever have any other emissive value than black, no matter what you try with the meshes or whatever. You could make them use a different material than "skin" of course, but that would destroy some functionality of these meshes being actual bodyparts.

That's why usually tatoos are created by the means of worn items or a seperate "layer" of surface above the actual body meshes.

Hm, guess I'll try making it super-reflective with the normal map then. Thanks for your help!

That should do. I achieved satisfying "glowy" results by a similar technique.