Light Tracer Glitter

Finalising

Finalise your model and animations in VoxEdit and test them in game before doing anything. Ensure that anything you want to have lighting effects for in game have lighting effects set in VoxEdit. Always test everything in game before going anywhere near Light Tracer. This should really be used for final polish, and for showing off your results. Light Tracer can be great for highlighting issues and giving a different view, but the time involved (especially in rendering a video) is going to be costly.

Decoupling (shut up mum)

Light Tracer should be based on VoxEdit and the Game Maker result. Manipulating models designed for Sandbox to add glitter is just wrong if you are selling a final product. If you are doing something cool or making a video, or something else...absolutely go for it.

So for example looking at the image on the right, you have a sword in a single piece/node. I want that gem in the blade to glow. I decoupled the gem and made it a separate element so I could then increase the Power of the gem, without impacting the rest of the model, which is particularly important if you have say a node with multiple lighting effects as I have here.

Fine for specific purposes but if you plan to use this in game, or for a competition, then you should only display what you produce. Decoupling decreases performance in game. Using this for Glitter if it doesn't represent the final in game model, seems wrong. Using this method to then reverse, and using a model in VoxEdit for GameMaker with additional nodes (leaving decoupling in place where the only benefit is in light tracer), is just wrong on so many levels.

Setting Lighting (Glowing Effects) in VoxEdit

To make a particular element glow/light up...click the following button in VoxEdit... and it should work pretty well both in game, and when imported to Light Tracer. See note on decoupling, or how to handle if you have multiple colours in the same model you want to treat differently, or which require multiple lighting effects in LT.

The Glitter! Boosting Lighting Effects in LT Basics

There is so much more to it than this, but it provides fast and nice results!

Depending on your setup, and whether you have multiple colours in the same model with lighting effects, this method might produce some weird results if you don't decouple the element (see above). This example would not be possible if all elements of the blade were a single node.

But for the most part it should work fine if you only set the voxels you need to glowing in VoxEdit and/or you only need 1 colour changed.

So here the sword is in standard Sandbox template in 3 parts, sort of...I think naming is slightly messed up here but just click on what you want to change.

First off I want the gem in the guard to glow the same colour I set in VoxEdit (white). In this case it's In this case it's Handle-Local. Properties, Emission, Power (see first image). I set the power to 75 here just for demo. 1 is the default!

Ok that's fine but actually I now want to change it to red, but at power 75 as it doesn't show so well in red compared to white, so I want to increase the power to 150. I want the pommel to glow as well and be orange.

In this case as they are separate nodes there is no issue, if they are the same node you may need to decouple.

Select the Guard, increase power to 150, and select colour red.

Do same for pommel but set it to orange.

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