Highlighting objects in a scene

Scripting Issues
1

I am working on an application in which objects in the scene are in various states.A sample scene can be seen here .

I want to represent active objects brightly and the inactive/terminated ones are in a dull state.
There is also an intermediete stage in which an object is running.I want to highlight the running objects.

How can i do this in panda?

For the first one i wanted to use transperancy, but the transperancy does not seem to have any effect when the model is textured. The other option is to use a glow filter, but i do not have a graphics card on my laptop, so that doesn’t work.I tried using ambient light(white) and a spotlight(white) to highlight the bright object, but the object is not very bright enough( compared to the brightness generated by the glow filter). I tried using 2 spotlights,but that does not make the object more brighter. Are there any other ways of highlighting objects?

I am clueless as to how i can show running objects.I am thinking about adding a yellow border to the object, but can i do that without changing the model?Any other suggestions for representation are welcome. I thought of using a special coloured spotlight, but the colours of spotlight produce myraid colours when they fall on an object.

2

yourNodePath.setColor(r,g,b) works well when using a color like red to highlight stuff. Perhaps add a darker color to the un selected objects to make them appear dull ?

3

Also, in order to use transparency, on a textured or untextured model, you must do two things: turn on transparency with a nodePath.setTransparency() call, and then set the model’s alpha value to something other than 1.0, using, for instance, nodePath.setAlphaScale(0.5).

You can’t use a light (or any other technique) to make an object brighter than full white (before textures). If you want to make an object brighter when you highlight it, it has to be dimmer than full white to start with. The easiest way to change an object’s color is, as Yellow suggested, to use nodePath.setColor(), or nodePath.setColorScale().

Since textures are applied by the hardware after the lighting equation and the color scale effects, it doesn’t matter how dark your texture is–if the model is full white before you applied the texture, then it’s as bright as it will ever be.

David