Changing emissive mask color

[Lexii Lane]

Hello, I'm doing a pretty complicated build, and it has baked lighting with emissive masks. I am trying to think ahead on how the end user can customize my build via sharing textures, but I haven't figured out how to customize the emissive mask to glow custom colors when I export it from PS. For instance I would let the end user have access to the raw files that they could change the color from white to purple, but when you put that together in Photoshop, the alpha channel only lets me do black and white. Is there a way to do this differently? Or am I approaching this all wrong?

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

You can't give custom colors to the emission mask. The mask only controls how bright to make the diffuse pixel at that location. Black/0/0% means display at room light, white/255/100% means display as if it were under maximum lighting (same as Full Bright, just pixel-specific), and anything else is proportionally between those.

You can get closer to what you want by using glow instead. Glow is also affected by the alpha channel (even if you set the texture's display to No Alpha) and the owner can change the glow color. It'll be a little fuzzier and raise the object's render complexity.

Edited January 10, 2021 by Quarrel Kukulcan

[Wulfie Reanimator]

For emissive mask, the alpha (greyscale) determines which parts glow and how much.

The color being emitted comes from the regular RGB channels. If you have the files and you want to change the color, all you need to do is not touch the alpha.

Similarly, you could simply have the white emissive texture and tint it with the in-world editing tools.

Edited January 10, 2021 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Lexii Lane]

16 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

For emissive mask, the alpha (greyscale) determines which parts glow and how much.

The color being emitted comes from the regular RGB channels. If you have the files and you want to change the color, all you need to do is not touch the alpha.

Similarly, you could simply have the white emissive texture and tint it with the in-world editing tools.

So if I made the diffuse purple, the color emissed would be purple, but I have to do nothing with the alpha mask? I can change the diffuse color to any color I need and it will translate over?

[Wulfie Reanimator]

13 minutes ago, Lexii Lane said:

So if I made the diffuse purple, the color emissed would be purple, but I have to do nothing with the alpha mask? I can change the diffuse color to any color I need and it will translate over?

Yes, but for that reason I think you should leave the texture itself white, and only add color to it in-world.

Uploading separate color textures is both limited and inefficient, of course assuming that we're only talking about flat colors. If you have a more complex color system going on (for example, many shades of purple in the same texture), you can adjust the colors in Photoshop.

Edited January 10, 2021 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Lexii Lane]

7 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Yes, but for that reason I think you should leave the texture itself white, and only add color to it in-world.

Uploading separate color textures is both limited and inefficient, of course assuming that we're only talking about flat colors. If you have a more complex color system going on (for example, many shades of purple), you can adjust the colors in Photoshop.

ok - Sounds great, Thanks for your help! And Quarrel, thank you too!