2008

Self-Illumination
The lamp on the right uses self-illumination to brighten the bulb and the glass panes.
Self-Illumination creates the illusion of incandescence by replacing any
shadows on the surface with the diffuse color. At 100 percent, the shadows
are completely replaced by the diffuse color, creating the illusion of
self-illumination.
Unless you use environmental effects, only lights illuminate your scene; they
don't appear in the rendering. You can use self-illuminated materials on objects
that represent lights to provide things like car headlights, and so on.
A self-illumination map lets you use a map to affect the intensity in different
areas of the self-illuminated surface. Like many other map types, only the
intensity of the map values affects self-illumination. White provides the most,
while black blocks the illumination completely.
It's often a good idea to design a self-illumination map to match your diffuse
map. For example, the diffuse map might have small, yellow rectangles to
represent windows, while the self-illumination map consists of matching
white rectangles against black to illuminate the yellow windows.
7924 | Glossary