Anyone played with this and made anything, I`m intrigued... :)
yeah...well, sort of...more or less trying out new things on non-animated meshes (tis how I "discovered" this technique)
this is my older starfighter model (from the contest a few weeks back)...has a 512 by 512 normal "bump" map, a 256 by 256 skin, a 128 by 128 "glow" map, and a 512 by 512 specular highlight map...along with the two cubemaps (one for normals, the other for light coloring)...as well as a third cubemap (greyscale version of the light coloring map, setcubemode 1) that works with the specular highlight map...
Yeap...this is pure Blitz3D:
done in one pass useing the same code as above (but with the landscape removed)...the original model was given a meshsmoothing in Ultimate Unwrap, accounting for the screwy texturemaping in some areas...so the model is about 1200 polygons...additionaly the specular highlights are real easy to do, but potentialy performance costly...
To do them I just did a copymesh on the ship model...parented it to the shipentity...set it to additive blend...textured it with the specular highlight cubemap (greyscale version of the lightcolor cubemap) in layer zero...and on layer 1 it recieved the specular highlight "mask" (as seen here, I just used the greyscale bump map used to generate the normal map)...what is pretty cool about this is you can control it easily (entitycolor, entityalpha, entityfade, etc) also you could use a spheremap instead, or even just light the mesh with a hardware light parented to the camera to get that "sperical highlights traveling with the camera" effect.
Now the window effect on the star fighter, well that is quite cool...and very easy to do...the pic doesn't do it justice as the windows are completely black when viewed from the lighted side...but from the shaded side they seem to glow green...this was easy in that it's all done through the normal map, basicly inverting the RGB colors for that section of the map...then when DOT3 combined with the cubemaped normales...when in "light" the windows are black...but in shadow when everything else is dark, that section is light...the green color actualy comes from the skin :)