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Lighting Issue - Some DTS are BLACK, others are not..

by Nicolai Dutka · in Artist Corner · 09/01/2009 (6:30 pm) · 6 replies

As you can see in the image included, the room itself as well as the door on the left is receiving lighting, but the door on the right is pitch black. I have compared all the settings on all 3 objects and all 3 are identical... What could possibly cause such ugliness??

i195.photobucket.com/albums/z83/kingdutka/lighting-1.png

All three objects are DTS exports from 3ds Max.

I'm using TGEA 1.8.1, 3ds Max 2010, and a recent exporter downloaded from a thread somewhere in these forums by a user named 'Eb'.
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Associate Dave Calabrese
Cerulean Games
#1
09/01/2009 (8:03 pm)
My first guess is you have a shader problem. If a shader has a compiling error, it will render as all-black in TGEA. (I think this should be modified to show a flashing rainbow of colors to highlight the problem better, but I digress...)

Torque 3D Owner Nicolai Dutka
#2
09/01/2009 (8:52 pm)
I'm not using any shaders that I am aware of. This same thing is happening on a couple random objects such as a door frame, but countless other objects are doing just fine.

It should also be noted, this only happens with the Sun removed from the scene... The objects that are rendering solid black DO accept sunlight...

Associate Dave Calabrese
Cerulean Games
#3
09/01/2009 (8:58 pm)
Ohhh... depending which of the engines you are using (as I don't believe that Torque3D has this problem), objects are VEERRRYYY sensitive to sunlight. If you have them set to accept sunlight, they probably would turn black if you removed the sun, no matter how many other lights are shining on them.

If you need to remove the sun from your scene due to certain level conditions, I would recommend instead setting all the objects to not accept sunlight, then have a series of lights that you dynamically control the light values of to mimic the change in sunlight. (Or, crack open the engine and see if you can find where it's miscalculating the lighting values when you remove the sun. I've never fixed this bug myself or else I'd share the code with ya for it. :) ).

Torque 3D Owner Nicolai Dutka
#4
09/02/2009 (4:08 am)
Already did that too.. It seems to be completely random which objects are effected by this. Like I said in the original post, the image depicts 3 objects all with the exact same setting, yet only one of them is black...

We have other levels that contain dozens of different objects and none of them turn black.

I have a scene in particular containing 30+ unique meshes and only ONE has this issue. I can make multiple copies of that one object in any given level I want and every single copy will have the issue in every single level...

Associate Dave Calabrese
Cerulean Games
#5
09/02/2009 (4:17 am)
Any chance that the all-black object might have its faces reversed or something from 3DS Max? I've had some cases where I have to almost randomly flip certain faces on a model for it to show properly in Torque, even if identical other models needed the faces flipped the opposite way...

Torque Owner TheGasMan
G.A.S. [+others]
#6
09/02/2009 (4:38 am)
I would try to flip the faces in max & then re-export.
Example:If you use the well-known 'box trick', in Max2010, faces tend to become flipped so I would not be surprised to find that other things cause facial-flips or vertex reordering for no reason.

[Max is unruly...what are ya gonna do.]