Glow effect in Free version Unity

Unity Engine
1

Hello,

First of all ive searched around in the forums but i couldnt find the answer. My question is: How can i make objects glow when using the Free Unity and thus not the Pro version.

Thanks in advance,
Mjblaster

2

The only way is through using actual geometry thats in front and has alpha based “baked glowing” (games like global agenda or also most nintendo games that have glows work like this, with fake geometry with alpha fade, additive blend and overlays)

any other form of glow is possible through unity pro only as it relies on render textures to achieve it dynamically at runtime

3

Checkout the 3D platformer project. Power-ups in that have a geometry-based glow effect.

4

Thanks allot. im going to try that out now! Thank you for the answers!

5

Global Agenda is using Unreal Engine and I’d bet these glows are using a post process shader:

http://game-server-hosting.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/Global%20Agenda%20-%204.jpg

The screen space glow in more recent Unreal tech 3 games is actually very nice (mass effect 2), it samples three layers from half size, quater size and 8th size glow renders and uses a separable Gaussian blur filter unlike unity’s glow which is a single quarter resolution sample using a box blur.

I’ve done a U3 like version of glow in Unity, looks great for specific effects, kinda expensive though.

You also ought to be able to use object shaders to get a glow like effect in Unity Indy. I’ve never tried it but I bet you could use a vertex shader to create an outer shell and shade the backfaces with a view normal falloff then just additive fill the normal geometry in a 2nd pass with the glow color. Probably better ways to fake it though.