Aimpoint or eotech reticle glow effect?

[roberthammer 582]

Hi guys,

Is there way to create somekind aimpoint dot/eotech glow effect?

Something like in cod4

You see that reticle glow effect , it looks more natural and realistic

ArmA 2 aimpoint dot

And my question is - is it possible make that in arma2?

Edited September 10, 2010 by RobertHammer

[JDog 11]

I think all the "scope" is, is an image. So I'm sure you could do that just playing with the alpha levels.

[STALKERGB 6]

I would also have thought it possible to replicate to some extent in ARMA2. Not really an expert on it but if you create a reticule in O2 to be used by a weapon I guess setting a RVMAT up in a particular way could create some kind of glowing effect.

Will have a look and get back to you. Actually don't the NWD scope reticules have a glow to them?

[suhsjake 1]

My guess is that you would have to fudge around with the dot texture alpha channel and the rvmat to achieve the "COD" look.

[[frl]myke 14]

Glowing is done by the "emmissive" parameter in rvmat.

[roberthammer 582]

Myke;1745863']Glowing is done by the "emmissive" parameter in rvmat.

That's only for night time

[da12thMonkey 1943]

I'd imagine you could get a similar look with photoshop by drawing the reticle with a thin white line and using the 'select\feather' to build up the glow in layers (choose feathering distance and press alt+backspace repeatedly until you get the opacity you want). First with a small 1px white feather, then larger and larger feathers in red or whatever colour you want the reticle in - mess about with the layer opacities until you have the right transparency at the edge.

Edited September 10, 2010 by da12thMonkey

[max power 21]

To have the dot glow in the dark, use the 'emissive' field in your rvmat.

Usually to make something look like it's blooming, you take the original, make a copy, put it over top of the original, Gaussian blur the heck out of it, then adjust its opacity until you get the desired balance.

This effect will be achieved in alpha channels rather than the look of the image itself, so you'll probably want to use that technique but with layer masks using a flat background until you get the effect you want. You can then make an alpha channel out of the layer mask.

Edited September 11, 2010 by Max Power

[[frl]myke 14]

To have the dot glow in the dark, use the 'emissive' field in your rvmat.

Usually to make something look like it's blooming, you take the original, make a copy, put it over top of the original, Gaussian blur the heck out of it, then adjust its opacity until you get the desired balance.

This effect will be achieved in alpha channels rather than the look of the image itself, so you'll probably want to use that technique but with layer masks using a flat background until you get the effect you want. You can then make an alpha channel out of the layer mask.

This...or you just open GIMP and apply a "Neon tubes" effect filter, looks pretty the same as the reference pic.

[max power 21]

Myke;1746723']This...or you just open GIMP and apply a "Neon tubes" effect filter' date=' looks pretty the same as the reference pic.[/quote']

And then I guess you would have to construct the alpha channel by hand? Or does this filter also apply to scalar mask?

[[frl]myke 14]

The neon filter usually creates several layers and the picture default is RGBA anyway. The layers usually are separated into the neontubes, the glow effect and a black (or self defined color) background. Just delete the background layer and you'll end up with a glowing aimpoint. You might play around with layer transparency aswell.

:EDITH:

a quick and dirty work within minutes:

It is a matter of finetune with color, sharpness and son on to have the desired effect. All in all, i guess it can be done in less than one hour.

Edited September 11, 2010 by [FRL]Myke

[max power 21]

Myke;1747020']The neon filter usually creates several layers and the picture default is RGBA anyway. The layers usually are separated into the neontubes' date=' the glow effect and a black (or self defined color) background. Just delete the background layer and you'll end up with a glowing aimpoint. You might play around with layer transparency aswell.

:EDITH:

a quick and dirty work within minutes:

It is a matter of finetune with color, sharpness and son on to have the desired effect. All in all, i guess it can be done in less than one hour.

Seems pretty handy! The OP would just now need to have a brighter looking projection in the centre for the bloom to bleed from and a softer, larger bloom and I think it would be fairly close to BC2, I think.

[[frl]myke 14]

As said, it is a matter of finetune to get it accurate. I'm not a weapon specialist so i can just do guesswork a little how transparent it should be, how much glow it needs and so on.

[max power 21]

Oops, the OP says COD4 not BC2.

I don't think that the discrete amount of bloom really matters as long as it 'looks right'. In reality, I think the amount of smudged light that appears depends on the circumstances under which you view it.

[roberthammer 582]

[GLT]Myke- that looks pretty good , only to do make it more white than only red

[PTV-Jobo 820]

Hey fellas,

Sorry to dig up a rather old thread, but has anyone really gotten this to take off? I heard through the grapevine with VBS2 the aimpoints had a pretty nice glow to it, but with ArmA 2/OA's new shaders or whatever it just won't work the same way. I'm hoping for some progress. I did up some quicky red dot and eotech reticles and placed them over Robert's original pic so you could see what they could potentially look like in ArmA.

I tried messing with alpha's awhile back and it either didn't snatch the "glow" or just ended up looking like s**t, lol. So I'm hoping someone out there managed finding out anything to improve the reticles or get something like I did work and look decent. I have my .psd laying around somewhere and wouldn't mind giving it one more try. Any tips for a PS user?

[max power 21]

I haven't tried this in game but try this:

Copy this image

Open PS

Make a new document (1200 x 1200)

Press ctrl+v to add the image

Fill the background layer with black

use the magic wand tool with a tolerance of 32 and select and delete the white in the image you pasted.

Set the layer to 'linear dodge (add)'

Open the layer's fx properties.

Give it outer glow.

-opacity 100%

-noise 7%

-colour sample the red of the image

-size 70 px

Give it inner glow.

-opacity 100%

-source: centre

-size: 21px

Now go into the channels window.

Select the red channel

Ctrl+click the red channel

Create a new channel

Using the selection from the red channel, paste white into the new channel

Deselect.

Go back to layers.

Turn off 'outter glow'.

Turn off 'inner glow'.

Sample the red from the reticle.

Paste the red into the background layer.

Turn on inner glow.

That should give you an alpha texture you can play with.

[PTV-Jobo 820]

Hey Max, thanks a ton for posting that. I just tried it real quick on the EOTech in Roberts hk416 pack. This is what I had following your tutorial:

And sadly, ArmA decided to make it look like this in game:

I'm not sure to call this as a no go with ArmA or if it could be something else adding to the problem. Doing the alpha layer and how it looked, I honestly thought it was going to finally work too. Grrr!

[max power 21]

Weird. What does the alpha 1 channel look like?

Are you saving the image as _ca?

Did you save the image as a 32 bit targa?

If you turn on the outer glow again and make a flat black background, you should see what it's supposed to look like.

edit: It looks like it's displaying a bit small. I guess the geometry it's on is actually quite small as well. You can increase the size of the reticle to make it larger.

Also, try resampling the image to a 2^x size ie. 1024 instead of 1200 if you still have it at its native res. 512 would probably be more than adequate.

Edited April 23, 2011 by Max Power

[DaveP 66]

What you want for best effect on this is your RGB channel to be all Red, then just make the shape you want on the alpha channel, that way you don't get any odd colouring where you had your red fading in to your BG colour but some of the alpha channel fade also picked that up

[max power 21]

That's what the tut is supposed to do for him. I still haven't heard what the alpha rendering problem is.

[PTV-Jobo 820]

Yeah sorry, been having a few health issues crop up at the moment. What I did was .rar the actual PSD file and uploaded it to my mediafire account, just in case if you would like to take a look at the actual setup/layers/alpha 1. But I've pretty much followed the directions of the tutorial. Same values and everything. Unless I forgot to do something? If it's helpful to take a look at the PSD, you can grab it here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?bupm6zgt4wjchzp

But like I said, followed the tut, saved it as a tga and all that, had it replace the EOTech reticule in RH's HK416 pack to test it and it looked like what I posted. I believe RH even took a look at it and basically it looks the same way as I posted earlier. :butbut:

[max power 21]

Thanks for the reply, and sorry to hear about the health issues.

Yeah, it looks fine. I'm not the best at anticipating exactly what an alpha texture will look like but it shouldn't block everything in in red like that. The black parts should be totally transparent. Did you save it as a 32bit *_ca.tga texture?

[PTV-Jobo 820]

Cheers, yeah I've been keeping the medical profession fairly busy and rich the past month, lol.

As far as the file, yeah I was originally going to save as a png, but then I asked Robert what I have to save it as before turning it into a .paa since I forgot, and was told about the .tga and @32Bit. Then when I picked up the rifle out of the crate the inside looked like a really thin and white EoTech shape surrounded by this giant flat-red circle around it. The alpha had that nice fade as you get further out, so I'm stumped why it went totally flat like that at the moment.

Is there any other files that could be causing it perhaps? I'm not really sure what all those other file types do, so that's why I ask. As you saw even for yourself, it should have definitely looked a lot different in-game. Well I'm certainly not giving up that easy, heh. I'll keep looking and trying. Might see if there is another weapon pack that has an EOTech optic that I can test with. Perhaps another setting/file in the RH pack that might be adding to this weirdness with the Alpha 1 not really kicking in?

[max power 21]

Well, if you don't save it as something like eoaim_ca.tga, the game engine doesn't know you're trying to do an alpha texture.