The complete guide to Glows: ur ship look lyk AZN street car

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Cycerin
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The complete guide to Glows: ur ship look lyk AZN street car

Post by Cycerin »

Here, you'll learn to have your penisbricks glow in the night, enabling them to ram into space stations more easily. There are two ways to go about this:

1. Blurred Fake Aegis
Builders do not need custom sprites to create glows unless they want to. You may have noticed how Fake Aegis looks like, well, Aegis. Early on in the release of CE I noticed you could create a fancy looking "glowbrush" effect by cranking up the Blur field to 8 or 10, and at the same time lowering the Alpha to atleast 0.1 or preferably 0.03 or 0.05. Fine tune with Spread. This will make literally any section produce a nice, large and flickering glow. The larger and rounder the source section, the more coherent the glow will be.

Image
This ship exclusively uses fake aegis for the glow effect, maybe 6-8 sections altogether.

2. Custom Sprites.
Make a section sprite in Photoshop or GIMP that looks like a blurry white sphere with a completely black background, or just get one from the Fraxy Pack. For creating glows yourself, keep in mind you want enough canvas so there is atleast a few pixels of perfectly black space around it. Import it and set the blending to additive and the alpha to about 0.5 (lower alpha will make the glow more subtle).

As a general rule, you can scale sections like these to suit most needs, they will not appear grainy unless you make them really fucking huge. Glow sprites can be made with tons of different shapes to fit any look you can think of, as long as you know how to draw shit with the brush tool in photoshop.

Note that this thing will blow up along with your ship and lose its blending, sticking out from the other debris like bird shit on a black shoe. To avoid this, you can try screwing around with special Doodads instead, but then you can run into depthing problems - and you lose the option to apply fading effects.

Personally, I prefer Fake Aegis because of the flickering effect and the loss of cluttering glow sprites. Eri usually has custom sections with additive blending. But try them out, each to his own.

Note that badly placed glows will usually make a shitty ship even shittier. Like most elements of a good ship, they can be emphasized or subtly applied to round out the look.
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