Animating a glowing texture

Hi again

Again for my starship scene I want the engines to power up and glow as the camera flies past them. I tried following the tutorial on Unreals website however that didn’t work. Can anyone help please

Thanks
Alex

Hello Lawson112,

There are a number of ways to accomplish the fluctuation of the engines as you describe.

However, without knowing exactly what you are trying to achieve and how you have the engines setup it is hard to answer what you are asking.

Could you please link a screenshot of how you have the engines setup and how you are trying to make them glow as well as a link to the tutorial you were following. This way I will be able to understand the process and end goal of your project.

No problem, here is a link to the Maya playblast which should illustrate what I mean. There was also a glow map to the engine and impulse engines (the red strips the camera lingers on) so in UE4 that would be my emissive. The emissive would bloom massively just as the ship shoots off at the end. Hope this helps :slight_smile:

Ok, I believe I have a better understanding now. What you would like is for the red part of your ship to glow in a sort of “on” state that shows that the ship is powered. Then when the ship gets ready to take off then that light would intensify.

I believe this tutorial on animating and calling materials within blueprint and matinee will help. It involves setting up a material and then calling that material on play. Lastly, it tells the camera to play the animation.

You would have to adjust the materials to reflect an emissive changes as opposed to just the diffuse.

This is UE4’s official wiki and has many more tutorials such as this for any further questions. It is also a great tool for reference for any future projects you may have.

There is so many way for glowing object, but the as always we concern, point is how cheap and fast but also looking amazing.

I think putting emmissive particle is way expensive for just engine.
Mostly I saw from game is they’re using a texture after source like the engine thruster or kinda stuffs.

I would make a simple cylinder mesh in 3d modelign progran, and build a material shader as masked opacity with blur alpha channel mask.
and then unlit shading with only emmisive value would looking glowing after thruster or engine.

Particle Emitter with Trail option would looking more precise and realistic but expensive than just texture.

Well that is the first tutorial I tried but it didn’t seem to work. I have gotten a similar result using Time and Sine nodes but it’s not quite right. I made a quick video to demonstrate the texture and the nodes. Is it possible to have a sort of ‘pause’ node so it waits till I need it before glowing and then keep it glowing till the end of the scene?

Yes, there is a pause node in blueprints that can be used to set a complete pause or to regulate the amount of time between each pulse.

he just wants to animate the glow, increase and decrease its emission i guess, not that hard to figure out really :sweat_smile:

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