How to make a glowing black?

Hey, so I know how you can make a material glow by having a 3 vector plugged into emissive and making the values go higher than 1, but I have a situation where instead of color, I want black to have that ‘glow’ effect, and I thought that if I just made a glowing white and a oneminus that it would work, but it doesnt. How would i get a ‘glowing’ black color?

There is no such thing as a glowing black color. Would you want the bloom effect, but in black, so that it darkens the scene?

I’m not sure that the built-in material/post-process can do that, but I presume you can build your own post processor shader that looks at some particular material value and overlays a black filtered image on top of it.

Or you can use a particle system with smoke of some sort.

Or you can invert all the colors in the final tone mapping – white becomes black, etc. You’d have to make all your textures in inverse colors, too, for this to work out.

I’m not exactly sure if you can define any of this in blueprints, though, nor exactly how much this would fit into the existing pipeline; you may need to write some pretty low-level C++ to make it actually happen.

Well thats just silly, going to all that trouble for just a slight variation on something that is already in the game. I mean, what could possibly be the difference between adding colored glow, or even white glow, vs adding black glow. Seems like a slight difference to make that for some reason wasn’t added in the engine.

what could possibly be the difference
between adding colored glow, or even
white glow, vs adding black glow

I suggest you read up a bit on color theory, rendering engines, and the physics of light, then. Your gut feeling is mathematically and algorithmically inaccurate in this case.

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Hi Knobbynobbes -

Since UE4 uses Physical Based Rendering, the engine functions exactly the same as light in the real world. So in light, White is the combination of all colors and Black is the absence of all colors. So to get a glowing “Black effect” what you need to focus on is contrast. You would probably want to layer a white-Black-white effect to achieve what you are looking for.

I would also need to know what exactly the effect you are trying to accomplish to be able to exactly help you.

Let me know -

Eric Ketchum

and what about ultraviolet light that makes flourecent stuff glow? is that possible?

that said, a black glow would be awesome.