Overview

The Glow Effect simulates light bleeding from extremely bright surfaces. It's usually visible at night, for example on monitors, lamps, LEDs, some types of billboards, fire, neon lights or other lights sources.

It can currently be enabled with the Cloth, HumanSkin, and Illum shaders.

CRYENGINE supports this feature per material and it's texture based, meaning that it is possible to mask-out exactly which pixels should glow.

Usage

It's very simple to use the glow effect. There is just one parameter to adjust in material settings:

• Glow Amount: Defines glow strength. Use small values, like below 2.0 (or any value that doesn't look excessively bright), or else surface will glow a lot and it will be impossible to see any detail.

Extra Notes:

• To enable or disable the effect, use r_Glow 1/0.
• Glow color comes from diffuse texture RGB channels.
• Glow map comes from diffuse texture alpha channel. This allows you to mask out pixels where you want more or less glow.

Example of glow map in diffuse texture alpha channel. Left is Diffuse texture RGB channel, right is Alpha channel.

With and without glow effect.