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Vol.4, No. 6, June 2001
 

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Truespace3: Tip of the Month

Courtesy of Mike Olson

Lighting Properties for Objects

Lighting can be one of the most important factors contributing to the feel of your world. Therefore it is beneficial to consider for a moment what lighting properties to use when creating an object in Truespace. There are only two lighting properties that an object can have that are used by AW. They are AMBIENT and DIFFUSE. Ambient is the value that controls how an object will react to world ambient light. Diffuse is the value that controls how an object reacts to world directional light and also local lighting commands. You may have noticed how old AW 2.2 objects don’t get lit up very much by lighting commands in 3.0+. This is because the objects have ambient and diffuse values that are below 1 (full). Therefore they do not react to 100% of the light hitting them. The best values to use for all new objects are:

Ambient: 1

Diffuse: 1

The names for these values are different however in Truespace in the shader attributes box. The value that TS uses to represent ambient is still ambient. However the value used to represent diffuse is ROUGH. Not only that but the value is opposite. So in TS, for a diffuse value of 1 use a rough value of 0. Like this:

Ambient: 1

Rough(diffuse): 0

All other values only effect lighting in TS and are not used by AW. These are the best values to use so that your objects will react fully to all world lights. These settings will work fine for all objects in versions 2.2 and 3.0+, EXCEPT for objects that use plain color instead of textures. Plain colored objects that use these lighting values will appear bright white. The best thing to do is to make all objects textured, but if you don’t want to do that then use these values:

Ambient: .5 - .6

Rough(diffuse): .7

I hope this is helpful to anyone who may have been unsure of what lighting values to use.

Happy building! :)

*Activeworlds Citizens* : You can now get Truespace3 for $69.95!!! Click here: http://www.activeworlds.com/truespace/

 

 
 

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