Adding Emissions to Custom Textures

Do you need a texture to emit light? What can we do?

In my case, I have a test tube model with a texture image that needs editing. I want the glass area to emit a subtle light.

With the glass selected, I access it’s material in the inspector by double clicking on it. I then want to double click on the base map texture to open and edit in my preferred image editing software.

I use the magic wand tool to select the glass area and a light inside the test tube that will also emit light.

With emissions, we generally work with black and white colors. Black indicates areas that won’t emit. White in the other hand does does. I grab the bucket tool and start filling in the whites and the black.

Merge all layers and save as a .tga image file in the location of the original texture map.

Back to the glass material where you opened the base map, we need check Emission and drag the emission texture to the emission map box.

We now have a custom texture that emits!

Although, it’s intensity is strong! We need to adjust its settings to make it look good. Lets head back to the glass material to bring down the alpha of the base map down to 175. Go to the emission map and change the color if you’d like. I am going for a greenish-yellowish looking accent.

As you can see, when I tick on and off the emission check box, the emitting color is slightly so subtle and almost good for me! With more time messing with the settings, I finally found the right amount of illumination.

The subtleness might seem useless to you guys but it looks better than what it did before! I could of course create another variant and increase the intensity of the emission to emphasize the tube is full of glowing liquid.

Either way, it’s a great technique to be able to customize textures for emitting light!

Gabriel