Judge me as you want, but I got a bit into these items that slowly change their colors recently!
It seems that there are 2 famous creators who work with them, Tenkai and Rieno.

I would like to derive and create similar works to myself. To the rainbow we go!
Thought it wouldn't be too complex but guess boi am I wrong!

The tutorials about animated images and neon I found showed basically how to change an entire part of a clothing to a flat neon effect. This is done basically by 'converting' the texture's opacity into the neon. They also talk about not being possible to 'neon' a mesh with anyskin properties. But both those creators do! And they don't own the meshes, they're deriving!

So thing is: how do I put the neon effect to parts of clothing/hair without losing the opacity? How do I get neon without losing the anyskin property of an item?
I tried to manually create a .xrf and add it to the materials in the Debug 02 but the new file -while appearing in the meshes tab- just have no effect whatsoever on the mesh. Granted I used only old tutorials as they were all I could find.

I'm either writing the wrong things in the file OR there are extra steps needed that I'm unaware of. Can anyone enlighten me?

Thank you very much!

Can you show us an example of this Neon effect and maybe post the tutorials? I can try to decipher what their saying for you.

DataMine wrote:

@Bubblegunz Can you show us an example of this Neon effect and maybe post the tutorials? I can try to decipher what their saying for you.

Thank you for coming !

This is the kind of item I would like to create:
A hair as example:
https://www.imvu.com/shop/product.php?p ... d=42411973
(Derived from: https://www.imvu.com/shop/product.php?p ... d=42250833 )

And a shirt from the same creator:
https://www.imvu.com/shop/product.php?p ... d=28691229
(Derived from: https://www.imvu.com/shop/product.php?p ... d=21461986 )

Now I'll go with the tutorials that I could find (even in some Imvu groups). Seems that the information about this kind of product is really scarce and outdated, sadly !

https://www.imvu.com/catalog/modules.ph ... 6#11254306
The custom .xrf works fine to create the effect, but as the opacity is the main responsible to place the neon ("Transparent parts of opacity will turn to 'neon' when Skin Composite is enabled"), any item that needs it for shaping won't work with it. Therefore I couldn't get it to work with hair nor things like shorts using a custom body shape.
It'll also mess with meshes that use Skin Composite already, so I'm puzzled at how the shirt from Rieno worked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMPvIb4f_oo
Similar idea, won't use a custom .xrf nor Skin Composite, but the whole texture IS the neon effect, which means that texture details become a no-go.

Other than that I could only find Texture Animation tutorials similar to this:
https://www.imvu.com/catalog/modules.ph ... p&t=538837
Which seems off of what I want.

It's basically that. I did use your cache converter to peek at those creators' textures , and it seems that they're using the Opacity for neon effect. But they are surely doing more than the first tutorial above suggests.

Thanks again!

I went ahead and opened the products with our T3DE client to take a look at how they did were made and read through the information you linked us. I will try to make a new tutorial for you.

That video is basically a better version of the last tutorial I put in my last post. In a way it's gonna be useful as it explain with more clarity what I saw in some sites and topics, so thank you, it will be handy in future creations !
What I'm looking for is different though, as the effect doesn't seem to need a texture like that (mirrored an amount of times as the animation needs). The final animation is smooth, goodlordIneedtomakeit ! Hahaha!


I appreciate the help! I believe I did what both basic tutorials and what else I could find teached, and honestly this seemed a nice place to ask for help once I smacked my head on the wall .
Take your time

Here's part one of the tutorial. This will teach you how to add the extra material slot to apply the neon effect to viewtopic.php?f=157&t=12708

Let me know if you need a part 2 for learning how to make the texture that goes over the neon effect.

Am thankful for the first part! If I couldn't follow it I would drag my ass to a daycare , that said, yeah, I'm not completely saved from there, haha!
After that I got pretty much the result you show in one of your last screenshots.


Of course my first instinct was to bash my head right in the same mistake I did before: trying to change the textures normally and hit the "Skin Composite".


Worked and it didn't work, of course, because Materials 02 have a Skin Composite already, duh for me!

So basically I have these 2 questions:
How do I add Opacity there? (Let's say I want to get rid of the black sleeves of the shirt)
How do I make the neon not 'spread' to the body like it's happening there while keeping the shirt able to work with any skins?
Basically, the same result as Rieno's work linked previously.

Once more take your time and I need other English words for 'thank you' .

I think this warning from the that post sums up it up pretty well:

DimitriX89 wrote:

If the mesh already makes use of material slot 7, this technique can not be used. This is true for most clothing items that contain anyskin body parts. However, there are exceptions. If the anyskin parts use a material ID number other than 7 (anyskin properties are determined by material *.xrf file, not ID number), you can use this exploit, but you'll absolutely have to put a custom *.xrf into slot 7. Because if you'll tamper with actual "naked skin" material, the mesh will lose its anyskin properties.

The Basic IMVU shirt I derived in my tutorial uses a material slot with index 7 as the anyskin properties. That's why the shirt you link to in your original post edits a derived product.

The steps in my tutorial will still work you just have to find a product that doesn't use a material with an index of 7.

Understood! I was thinking about that part, actually, because in this case is it safe to say that the Neon creators above are using another route (maybe even having access to mesh)? They both derive from products that do have the index 7 being used for anyskin and still get neon/transparency just right without losing anyskin properties.

In fact, will any of your products or services allow me to see their products in the Create mode so I can use them for learning purposes? This month I'm holding to buy a last ram for my pc (and the chance to jump out of this damn Windows Phone), but the next one I'll probably have a lil cash to spare, want to try to grab something