Keep only the Glow effect and not the mesh?

Unity Engine
1

I modeled something in Maya and would like to use it in Unity - but only the glowing effect of it.

Here’s what I mean:

I tried the obvious thing (disabling mesh renderer) which gets rid of the glow as well.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me out here.

2

make a whole transparent PNG in photoshop/gimp, then apply it, so it’s there, but you can’t see it.

3

TheCowMan, I gave it a shot but it did not work due to the fact that Unity’s glow effect is based off of alpha channels. A completely transparent material would in fact get rid of any glow.

But anyhow, let me know if I missed any detail from you.

And thanks for the help, appreciate it.

4

Just render the alpha. Add ColorMask A to the shader, and if you know enough about how the shader works, get rid of all the other garbage in it that will be useless to you.

5

Whoops, i don’t have pro so i was just guessing. Sorry.

6

Jessy, I actually have no experience in ShaderLab, but I will check out your videos in the future.

For the time being, I’m procedurally generating some line renderers to simulate a similar effect. Though I’d love to have an easier solution later.

7

Really, I don’t think it could be any easier. Just add what I said from the last post before the passes in the SubShader. ColorMask is documented here. It’s two lines. Just doing that won’t be efficient, but it will give you matching glow results, in the alpha channel. The problem is that glow isn’t just about the alpha channel; the blue from your rod wouldn’t show up. I don’t have Unity Pro, or know enough about all this to help you a lot. However, here’s all you need to make a mesh render as glowy as possible, without color contribution:

Shader "Glownly" {
	
SubShader {
	ColorMask A
	Pass {}
}

}

(The default color for rendering is Color.black, so the alpha is as bright as possible.)