• 3D

  • [SOLVED] Making a GUI rendered to a viewport glow

Hi there,

slowly I'm getting somewhere with my toy project "Molecular Structure VR Viewer" (https://gitlab.com/tcrass/angstrom):

No I'm back to something I was already pondering over a year ago (https://godotforums.org/discussion/20111/how-to-apply-anti-aliasing-and-glow-to-a-viewport-used-as-mesh-texture): I'm using a 2D viewport as texture for a mesh in order to display some GUI controls (like in the HUD visible in the image above), and I'd like them to look as if they were glowing. I don't need them to actually emit light; they should just be surrounded by some blur of the same color as their outlines.

I understand enabling "glow" in the environment settings should do the trick (now, in Godot 3.2, even when using the GLES2 renderer), but I just can't get it to work -- neither when playing around with the default environment, nor when adding an own world environment to the viewport used for rendering the GUI. In the former case, everything except the HUD starts glowing, in the latter case I cannot observer any effect at all.

Am I missing something? Any hints welcome...

Cheers --

-- Torsten

OK,

after playing around with a minimal (non-)working example, I figured out that when enabling glow, the HUD does actually glow, but since a typical daytime sky's color is so bright, the sky glows even more! So I guess if I want a cool-looking, glowing HUD I'll have to use a darker scenery. Top: without glow; bottom: with glow enabled

5 days later

@Megalomaniak said: HDR rendering pipeline at work, I guess.

Probably not -- I'm using the GLES2 renderer, which, I understand, doesn't support HDR. But anyway, as I wrote, the HUD does glow, it's just not really visible with the sky featuring an even brighter color.

Cheers --

-- Torsten

Hmm, well, since you enabled glow I guess its a fairly simple implementation of bloom that works on everything in the scene, so the text there also glows, actually makes even more sense if you are using GLES2.

Might have to give the HUD objects material greater enery, but not sure how well it will work without the HDR pipeline.