Question on the Light Map tut

[Trylon]

That looks pretty good Andy!

[Nadnerb]

Well done!

It's great to see someone get this working, I was starting to wonder if I'd actually missed something.

Now, onward! Lighting like this is useful for more than just shadows. I'll pull out some old stuff here to demonstrate. The walls and ceiling in this room are plain, untextured, white. They look acceptable because of the lighting. Because of the lightmap, there is no flat color anywhere on it.

So now, my suggestions on the lights you've put in CampBravo. If you're using spotlights, widen the cone edges, (increase SpotSi and SpotBi in the spot and shadow panel) and if you're using omnilights, get rid of the shades during the lightmap rendering. You can make objects not cast shadows by un-checking the "Traceable" button in the Materials, links and pipeline panel. Soft light transitions often look much more appealing than hard shadows.

Also, if your lights seem a bit dim, try setting the vertex colors on the layer to white, as you don't need them anymore with the lightmap providing the light color.

[andylegate]

Thanks for the tips Nadnerb!

I've been working on them on and off today (mosty off as I'm getting other work done), but the evenings I'm sitting and working with them. I'm having fun as I see all the different ways to do some things that I thought impossible before......

THE WORLD IS MINE I TELL YOU! MINE! MINE! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH <-----evil Daffy Duck laugh...

[andylegate]

Oh yah, there's been one other thing that I've learned while fiddling with this: tranparent meshes are not transparrent, hehehe.

I decided to use this to cast some shadows long my chainlink fence...........Only to get black rectangles instead. DOH! I forgot what makes the fence look like it has those diamond holes is the texture, not the mesh!
So for doing that, I'll have to more than likely use that new Texture Light that's in the Wiki (seriously cool looking).

I ran into this while trying to get light to splash out of the school house windows....it wouldn't for some of them, and had me puzzled.......until I remembered that the ones the light was not going out were the ones that I had put "glass" in. They have glass because I put smudges and graffiti on them.

NP though, just move the windows to a different layer while making the light map, then move them back when done.

Yes, learning a lot here.

[Jojon]

Speaking of which...

Can/may we become able to do specularity maps? :7

[Nadnerb]

If you mean using a texture to determine the "specular shininess" of a surface, no, you won't be able to directly. However, you can already achieve this effect by having multiple materials with different specularity, and using an alpha map or alpha vertex painting to blend between the two. I personally prefer environment maps for shiny surfaces, and they have the added benefit of being layer-bound, so they can be accomplished with a single material and a stencil map. For an example of this sort of thing, see the shiny/notsoshiny tiled room in BoxAge. (it really has to be seen in motion, rather than a still picture)

[Jojon]

If you mean using a texture to determine the "specular shininess" of a surface, no, you won't be able to directly. However
...

Ah, ok. I was thinking of situations like the holes in Andy's chainlink fence being affected by things, amongst them, I surmised, specular lighting (or maybe they aren't -- misunderstandings am I...)

Myself, I am having these water surfaces whose vertex-pained alphas tend to gray out the additive wave textures and then the specular light washes over the surface uniformly (it does fade properly with the alpha, mind)...

I haven't dabbled with reflection maps yet, since they seem half-fiddly, I'd like to get the stuff "below" them right first and I'd like to fit some of the surroundings first. I may have to step up the learning/experimenting/working rate a bit, I guess - two envmaps might do the trick; one for the environment and one for the sun... :7

Do we know the order, other than Z sorting, in which colours/vertex paints/textures/specularity etc. affects the pixel output? A flowchart might be useful... Alpha verts certainly seems to "dim" the entire material, no matter how much light it has added, which I suppose is correct enough.

Btw, are you going to redo those pretty church window lightmaps as "gobos", now that it can be done? :9

[Nadnerb]

uhmm... "gobo"?

Anyway, the oprations for a layer in plasma would be something like this:

(((Ambient * vertexColors) + diffuseLighting) * materialColor * textureImage) + specularHighlights

[Jojon]

uhmm... "gobo"?

A gobo is a sheet-metal mask that you put in front of a theatre spotlight - i.e. our "projected layer" here.

Anyway, the oprations for a layer in plasma would be something like this:

(((Ambient * vertexColors) + diffuseLighting) * materialColor * textureImage) + specularHighlights

Many thanks! ...hmm, so, for the vertex colours to have any effect, amibient light must be non-zero... unfortunate, but should work quite well (provide the tint but not the level), if one just make the product dark enough, I suppose. :7