Guild of Writers

Ok, just the beginning of this year, I couldn't do anything in blender, but now I can texture, and model pretty good... but there's one thing that ALWAYS makes my ages seem crude and Inferior to many of the ages I've seen you guys do... and that thing is lighting... the tutuorial for lighting on AgeCreate (alcugs) tutuorials do not help... can anyone (or does anyone know where I could find) a tutorial, specifically for URU, that explains the process of lighting in an easy to understand way... Once I tried to change a bunch of settings for lights I put in an age I made... but nothing happed when I linked to it, it was just as If I'd not done anyting! and when I don't even add a sun, when I link in, the age seems as if it has some univerial light sourse that lights up everything (except my avi) and comes from every direction at once. How do I make good lights, to make my ages look good?

As with many things, the new plugin has kind of changed the game on lighting. You are right in that there are not really any good tutorials on Lighting for Age creation. One reason for this, is that when you render things in Blender, you can do things with lighting and achieve results that are very hard to get or non-exsistant in the Plugin.

Let me show you a picture here:

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Now, in this scene is my first training Age, Campbravo, only this is going to be a night time version of it. The result you see actually is only half lighting. The other half is Vertex Painting.

First I removed my overall light for my Age, the Sun. That of course did not make anything look dark in Blender. Only when I exported the Age, and linked in did it look dark. But also, because I changed the sky texture from a rich blue color to a black sky with a star field. So again, to make it dark looking I had to remove not only the lighting, but had to change the texture in the sky.
Next, I created the lamp post and light fixture. Then I put in a spot light. No, it did not give the the result that you see in the above pic (all though if we had Blender working like Raidiant, it would work just fine).
To get the result above, I had to change the abience of the textures. There were 0.1 and I moved them up to 0.5. that seems backwards as increasing the Amb would normally brighten the textures. But in this case I had them set to 0.1 for my day time Age. That's too dark for the night time.
Next, I selected the objects in the area and added a vertex color. This darkened the textures to what you would see in the age with only a weak spot light (spot lights are WEAK in blender with the plugin, they SUCK to put it bluntly). Next, I picked a soft yellow color for my vertex color and selected the ground. I then went to Vertex Paint and started spray painting the ground. I repeated this step for the surrounding objects. The book stand looks bright in Blender right now, as I had not done it yet (nor the edge of the swimming pool that you see).
The down side to doing it this way, is if the faces of your objects have a low vertex count, it's a LOT harder to control your painting. So you may have to increase the verticies.

Now, some people might just lay a plane down like a decal, but that doesn't work to well for a rolling, bumpy terrain, nor does it work to well for your surrounding objects. Keep in mind the more stuff (meshes) you add to your age, the larger your prp will be.

Bottom line is this: This is FAKE. The realism is there only because I painted it there. Right now, lights are lousy (sorry Trylon and guys, I know you're working hard on it, but in truth, programs for the FPS's like Radiant have dynamic lighting that is easy and powerful to use). Making your lighting look real is going to be all about the textures.

FYI use yafray rendering engine if you have it. Depending on your system it may take it a bit, but I've had 8 lights in a scene and it was still dark. Before I export anything I check it with yafray.

Heres the download link http://www.blender.org/development/rele ... y-plug-in/

I just downloaded the windows version and installed it. It was rather easy. its a addition to blender. you can find it under F10 under the render button.

Heres some images of my shell(work in progress)

First is yafray with 8 lamps around the area one above the area. 20 distance 1.000 energy on all




second is blender render same setup as above.



Using it may give you a better way of judging the lighting in blender and give a better export. Might have to do it acouple times to get things right, but thats why this is so fun Oh just leave the yafray setting at default, well unless you feel brave.

Andy: I hope you don't mind me attempting to correct a few things you've said about lighting. I'll address some of the things you've said, but first, from my view, there are 3 basic ways of lighting your scene for plasma. Two of them allow you to see the exact results previewed in blender.

One is to set Amb to 0 and let all the lighting be dynamic. The advantage to this is that your lighting will be consistent between your avatar and your surroundings. (since everything is lit by plasma, it will be consistent) The downside of this is that it is hard to tell what your age is going to look like in blender, and everything will be vertex lit. (plasma has no per-pixel lighting, unless you're using a bumpmap, which I'm not sure is possible right now.) However, if you're using textured view, you can get blender to give you a bit of an idea what your lighting will look like. Take an object into UV face select mode, select all it's faces, and press [W] - Set - Lights. Now blender will light the textured object in real time. (move your lights around and see) What you see will be somewhat reminiscent of what you will see in plasma if you make sure Amb is set to 0. (assuming you're using the new plugin and all lights are appended by default) In the future, we will be able to have plasma generate shadows dynamically, (think gira) but for the moment, this is not possible.

The second method is to set Amb to 1, set Shadeless on, and let blender generate vertex colors based on your lights by deleting the vertex color layer and pressing "new". (generate the vertex colors before setting shadeless to on, or blender will take that setting into account when generating the vertex colors, but be sure to set shadeless before exporting, or everything will be double-lit) The advantages are that the vertex colors you see will translate exactly into what you see in plasma. The disadvantages are that it's still vertex lit, and you won't be able to move the lights around or activate/deactivate them in-game.

The third method is to use blender do generate lightmap textures for your age. This is the most complex method, but it allows you to use any feature of blender's lighting model to create your lighting. Once again, Amb 1 and Shadeless on, this time, use blender's "bake" function to bake the lighting onto the second uv layer and then set that layer to multiply. (or do what I did in tunnelDemo and externally process the image to make an alpha texture, and map that to a decal mesh. )The disadvantage is the amount of work it requires for each object, and the fact that you can no longer use any dynamic lighting.

Now to go on to each of your points:

when you render things in Blender, you can do things with lighting and achieve results that are very hard to get or non-exsistant in the Plugin.

This is mostly true. Blender's renderer is a raytracer, it can certainly do things plasma cannot, but it definitely can't do those things in real time, which is what we want. If you want real time, you either use the dynamic lights and get vertex colors, (not excellent quality, dynamic) or you use blender's raytracer to generate lightmap textures. (static, lots of work)

The result you see actually is only half lighting. The other half is Vertex Painting.

This is fine. All the lighting in Odema is vertex painted. Plasma treats vertex colors as added light, so additional dynamic lights, if you decide to add them, will work, and as long as your vertex paint lines up with the lights that are affecting the avatar, no one will know the difference.

There were 0.1 and I moved them up to 0.5. that seems backwards as increasing the Amb would normally brighten the textures. But in this case I had them set to 0.1 for my day time Age. That's too dark for the night time.
Next, I selected the objects in the area and added a vertex color.

Err, not sure what's up here... If you want to use vertex colors for lighting, set your Amb all the way up to 1. Then what you see when you vertex paint in blender will be exactly, precisely, what you will see in plasma. (the way amb is exported is that all the vertex colors are multiplied by the amb value before they are exported, and as I said, plasma treats vertex colors as light.)

(spot lights are WEAK in blender with the plugin, they SUCK to put it bluntly)

I'm not really going to argue with this, but I'd suggest fiddling with the settings more. Try pressing the "quad" button, and playing with the Quad2 value slider. I won't say any specific values, because the results have changed drastically between plugin versions.

Now, some people might just lay a plane down like a decal, but that doesn't work to well for a rolling, bumpy terrain, nor does it work to well for your surrounding objects. Keep in mind the more stuff (meshes) you add to your age, the larger your prp will be.

I'm not sure what you intend to have such a decal for, but you can create one for your terrain mesh by just duplicating it, or if you only want part of it, duplicate that bit in edit mode and press p to separate it into a different object.

Bottom line is this: This is FAKE. The realism is there only because I painted it there. Right now, lights are lousy (sorry Trylon and guys, I know you're working hard on it, but in truth, programs for the FPS's like Radiant have dynamic lighting that is easy and powerful to use). Making your lighting look real is going to be all about the textures.

I won't say that the lighting features available are easy to use, but I would like to say that there is some power there, it's just.. well, hard to use. This is entirely due to the fact that blender was not written for the sole purpose of interfacing with plasma, and so does not exactly replicate it's features like your other editors would. Also, plasma itself is an outdated engine. Most newer engines would not have you stuck using vertex lighting if you wanted anything dynamic. Any clearly defined spotlights or shadows in uru are lightmap textures. However, I would not call lightmaps fake, as many FPS editors will generate static lightmaps for much of the map lighting, much the way I described baking lightmaps in blender, only much easier.

All these different ways to light, what happened to just putting in a light, setting its radius, intensity, and colour, and script effects, like strobing rotating, shooting?

ok, I'm confuzed... what's vertex paint, what's a spot light, what's yaftray. remember guys, I have no experience at lighting at all..., so don't take it for granted that I'll understand what you're saying... can any of you just say something like
"Ok, here's how you light a scene. there are these different types of lights. if you adjust this setting, this will happen, to make an object glow, do this, to make an object shine colored light, do this... vertex painting does this" lol

No Justin, they can't. And there is a good reason that they can't do that.

Everyone's needs will be different. That's exactly what we're talking about here. There is no One Set Way to light your Age (unfortunately and fortunately depending on how you look at it).

However, your question of "What's a spot light?" distresses me. It means you need to go back and re-do some of the Blender Tutorials (Noob to Pro).
While I know you might be all excited to make Ages right away, not knowing Blender well will only hurt your Age, and make you frustrated.

Spot Light is a type of light you can put in. If you click on Add, and look at the menu, you'll see Lamps> and when you go to Lamps> you'll see several different kinds listed:

Lamp
Area
Spot
Sun
Hemi

Spot is the Spot Light (a directional light that points one way, for a cone of light effect.

Vertex Painting is a way to apply textures to your Meshes. Again, you need to go back and look at some of the tutorials, all though for this one, I'd wait until they come out with the new ones that they've been talking about.

Yaftray is exactly what Goofy said it was: "rendering Engine" go check out his link to it.

EDIT:
Just wanted to add this pic. There are some programs Justin that make creating a 3D world very easy. The Ravenshield Editor is a prime example of that. The base program is called GTK Radiant, but this version of it was Custom Made for editing map levels for the First Person Shooter game called Rainbow Six: Ravenshield. It really only takes about a day to learn how to use it. It's that simple compared to other editors, and definately compared to Blender and the Plasma plugin.
For example, in this picture, if you look at the rendered 3D view, you'll see the scene. I'm in a garage I made. Look at the walls, support beams, door, doorframe, the Washer and dryer.....you'll see shadows and lit areas. These look the way they do both in the editor and in game, because of how lighting is done. You can see my lighting represented by the lightbulbs in the editor. The scene was dark until I put them in. And all you have to do is open up the properties of each light and tell it how bright, what color the light is, what kind of light, and how powerful the light. The editor does the rest, it literally puts in the shadows, and yes, in this program, meshes will cause shadows upon other meshes, just like in real life.
This program is a dream to use, and it's too bad that Uru doesn't use a game engine like this, as making Ages would be a lot more fun, because it would be a lot more easy. You'd be able to spend more time dreaming and creating, instead of spending 90% of your time trying to figure out HOW to do things, and the other 10% trying to make it work!

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Well, first of all, in Noob to pro... I only got up to Modeling using a photo, because it was too difficult and confuzing, and I figured that I could figure the rest out myself, and by asking people (much easier than trying to figure out the confuzing things in the tutuorials) Surprizingly, I have gotten alot better at blender since then, and perhaps I should continue those tutuorials O, and I played w/ Vetex paint a bit, and I hav a question... is there a way to make it paint black, instead of paint your textures on a whole plain of black? it's very difficult to do when you cant see where anything is, because it's too black.

Justintime9 wrote:I played w/ Vetex paint a bit, and I hav a question... is there a way to make it paint black, instead of paint your textures on a whole plain of black? it's very difficult to do when you cant see where anything is, because it's too black.

err....If I misunderstand you correctly; just change from textured display to shaded or solid. (...or, if that is the case, fill all with white (or gray) and then reduce to black, instead of going the opposite direction.)

I'm not sure and please correct me bit I believe Cyan mostly uses vertex shading and uses baked light maps for more complex lighting. I had the impression lights are only used to light the avvie.

Am I correct? Has anyone studied the lighting by importing Cyans ages?