megapatato

[many years later...] An example of a mesh with vertex colors is the daedric armor (e.g. daedriccuirass_1.nif). The main armor component uses the environment map shader to yield metal-like reflections. The glow component is handled by the BSEffectShaderProperty node on a separate piece of geometry. This glowing geometry has light emission, texture translation (i.e. V coordinate offset), and vertex transparency. A) the texture used is VaporTile02.dds but its alpha / transparency is overridden via the Grayscale_To_PaletteAlpha (in shader flags 1), which signals using the grayscale image in GradDusguiseShader02.dds to remap / regenerate alpha values based on the formula described above by abies. B) texture translation is handled by the BSEffectShaderPropertyFloatController (i.e. it changes the V coordinate of the UV mapping as a function of time) C) in addition, the vertices themselves have alpha values, allowing the glow to have both sharp edges (close to the armor) and falloff regions (away from the armor). In the image attached, I set the alpha value of the three left-most vertices to various levels (labeled on the image). To view these changes in NifSkope 2.0dev7, one has to save changes, and reload from file (seems NifSkope cashes vertex alpha values and won't refresh them when changed). So, point A turns the opaque texture into a translucent one, and point C allows the "glow" to dim / strengthen as the geometry requires it.