Neon/emissive/HDR materials look bad

Unity Engine
1

Red and orange cannot be made emissive. You can only pick from these 3 colors for bright emission:

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This isn’t realistic. When colors get bright, instead of just going to an extreme of purple, yellow or blue it should retain it’s color data and just start to wash out (turn white). Is there a way to achieve this desired effect?

In this Brackeys video at 9:11 it shows his colors starting to wash out as they get brighter. Do I just have my project’s lighting set up wrong?

Any advice would be helpful. Thanks.

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2

Are you using a Bloom post processing effect? That’s generally how you achieve the effect of very intense colors glowing white.

1 Like
3

I have and it doesn’t seem to make any difference. Bloom doesn’t seem to change how the HDR color picker works at all.
My desired result is for turning up the intensity of an HDR color to make it start to turn white. When you switch to HSV (instead of RGB 0-255) and set the saturation to max and value to max and turn up the intensity to like 10 or something and then drag the hue around you’ll notice you can only really pick from 3 colors at that point and they won’t even look that bright.
This isn’t how real colors work and adding bloom hasn’t been doing anything to change how the color picker works for me.

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4

If you are using pure colors (which means some of the channels are zero) you are not going to get the white out effect. Since really_high_number * 0 = 0. Maybe don’t use so pure colors?

Also the effect you are talking about is usually the result of tonemapping + post processing, so looking at the color picker doesn’t help much.

1 Like
5

Ok, I think I figured out my problem. Turns out when you set up post processing, even after enabling bloom the intensity value is 0 by default so I had to turn it up to make it visible. I also found that for the material I was trying to make neon/glow I needed to set its albedo to black and disable receive shadows that way it was purely just glowing. After doing all that it was way too bright so I turned the intensity of the HDR color I was using for its emissive color down to 1 and tweaked the bloom settings until I was happy and now I think I have the result I was looking for.

Thanks for the help guys.