Coronas (the non-alcoholic kind lol)

Lots of people have asked me about the ins and outs of coronas so I've copied over the official information about them here and added my own thoughts and tips to help make it more understandable:

Here's how most builders will type out a basic corona line in an object:

create corona corona_flare06

Other options can be added to change the appearance also. Those can be read about farther down this page but there is one tip that's not mentioned. Most builders prefer to have the corona visible itself and not the object that it is typed into so always remember to add ,visible no on the end of your "create corona" line. And now the official information [with my comments added in brackets like these]:

corona texture [mask=mask] [size=size] [name=name]

The corona command places a corona over an object.

A corona is a transparent image that is stamped on to the 3D scene on top of an object whenever that object is visible to the user. Although similar in some ways to sprites [like food5.rwx for example], they differ in that their size does not vary with distance from the camera, and the entire corona is either visible or not visible depending on whether the corona's source object is currently visible (i.e. not obscured by any other object.) The primary purpose of coronas is for creating "halo" effects around local light sources.

The TEXTURE specifies the name of the texture to use for the corona. The texture must come from the world's object path. While technically any texture can be used as a corona, obviously for a good effect the texture should be one that has been specifically designed to be a corona.

If the object also has a light command on it, the corona will automatically be colored the same as the light, if it is a non-white light. Thus, a single corona texture can be used for multiple light sources even if they are different colors.

The optional MASK argument specifies a texture mask file for masking the corona texture, also from the world's object path. If no mask is specified, the texture is self-masking. Self-masking means a transparency mask for the texture is generated from a grayscale version of the same texture. Self-masking is usually sufficient for most corona effects.

The optional SIZE argument controls the size of the corona relative to the size of the 3D viewport. The default is 100 [so, for example, size=25 looks pretty small].

The optional NAME argument specifies the name of the object to place the corona on [just like in remote move, rotate, animate, etc commands].

~Ewasx~