Guild of Writers

As the devs continue to work on the 2.0 series of PyPRP. I was wondering if they thought of redoing layer support.

Currently there are lots of things lacking in layers that are of vital importance to age creation. The main thing being the color of a layer.

As some may know. There are four different colors that go into a plLayer. PreShade, Runtime, Ambient, and Specular. Each of these have four settings. Red, Green, Blue and Alpha.

In Uru, 90% of all layers have their specular colors set to 0 (asside from the alpha).

BUt there are severe limitations in this in blender.

For instance, setting the Color of a material in Blender, sets the preshade and runtime color of a layer. (This is the main color that the material will take, and is seperate from vertex painting, which is part of the drawablespans.) The problem with this is that there's only one section for setting the color of the material in blender. As a result, what PyPRP does, is take material, and the full color of the material for its runtime color, and half that for its preshade color.

Most of the times this is fine, but with stencils, and other advanced materials, this throws stuff into whack, as the preshade color and runtime colors in uru or nearly always the same.

The ambient color is another example. Unless there's a setting somewhere that I'm not aware of there's no place in blender to set the ambient color so its always 0 in Uru.

I was just wondering if this going to be cleared up in the next series of pyprp.



What PyPRP seems to currently do is

GPNMilano wrote:The problem with this is that there's only one section for setting the color of the material in blender. As a result, what PyPRP does, is take material, and the full color of the material for its runtime color, and half that for its preshade color.

Actually, you can use the "Amb" slider to set the preshade to anything from 0% to 100% of the Runtime color

Most of the times this is fine, but with stencils, and other advanced materials, this throws stuff into whack, as the preshade color and runtime colors in uru or nearly always the same.

Just crank up the "Amb" Slider to 100% and the preshade and runtime colors will be the same

The ambient color is another example. Unless there's a setting somewhere that I'm not aware of there's no place in blender to set the ambient color so its always 0 in Uru.

if I recall correctly, (and I did design the current layer support) the ambient color didn't do much effectively when I experimented with it. We didn't make a way to set it in the definitive implementation though IIRC.


What PyPRP seems to currently do is[/quote]

Trylon wrote:if I recall correctly, (and I did design the current layer support) the ambient color didn't do much effectively when I experimented with it. We didn't make a way to set it in the definitive implementation though IIRC.

Thanks for the clarification about the preshade vs runtime colors. The Ambient Color is used mostly for layer animations, though its also found in simple layers as well. From what I've found it's generally useful in ages that are bright in general. Gira for example uses it alot for its water effects, particle systems, and even the Hood linking book.