   Glowing surface?
  So I'm pretty new to lighting effects.  Modeling I understand, pixels and voxels and triangles and camera angles and matrices I've totally got down, but any lighting more advanced than specifying a type, position, and color of light is still pretty new to me.  With that in mind, here's what I want to do:I want to create a white cube against a black background, one face of which should appear to be glowing bright blue.  I've tried making the surface bright blue, and the surface does look bright blue, but it doesn't "glow."  Not being the most artistic person in the world, I'm not sure exactly what it should look like or even what the name of the effect is.I don't know if I want the light to bleed out from the cube; I'm looking for a way to show that it's glowing.  Maybe think about how you might render a big fluorescent light panel.Ideas?   
  buzzwords: HDR, bloom. probably more than you actually want though.   ;  It's never too much info :)But I'm wondering if it's possible for something to appear to glow without actually bleeding out of their shape.  Like, I'm wondering if I make the corners a bit darker somehow if it might help.An example of the short of look I'm going to is during the intro to Kingdom Hearts 2, while Sora's running up some lit stairs:;  Along side bloom (you don't need HDR for that, infact, HDR won't give you that), you might just want to look into radiosity lightmapping. It won't give a 'realtime' glow look, meaning they won't pulsate, nor can you turn them off in game. But it doesn't result in any costs to run it, and you can do it on lots of static objects. Anyway, chances are, you really want bloom, it will/should look much better.   ;Quote:Original post by acid2Along side bloom (you don't need HDR for that, infact, HDR won't give you that), you might just want to look into radiosity lightmapping. It won't give a 'realtime' glow look, meaning they won't pulsate, nor can you turn them off in game. But it doesn't result in any costs to run it, and you can do it on lots of static objects. Anyway, chances are, you really want bloom, it will/should look much better.For the old fixed function pipelines, there is a radiosity color, that acts as a custom light source on the polygon. This means the polygon can be much brighter than the light it gets. This looks like the light is coming from the polygon itself. There is no need for hdr or bloom, but the light will only effect the pixels of the polygon. The example above probably uses the same technique. By changing this color component, you can make objects pulse or you can turn on and off neons and other light emitting objects.Viktor   ;  Yes, using radiosity is a good idea, but the whole shape looks a little too uniform, I think.  Maybe if I turned down the radiosity a little near the edges?   ;  In that Kingdom Hearts pic, it looks like they just map a glowy texture onto the stairsteps.   ;  have you tried playing around with emissive material properties for your objects?   