Lighting an Exterior?
by Jonathan Wheat · in Game Design and Creative Issues · 06/12/2007 (2:42 pm) · 12 replies
Hello,
we are trying to light an exterior and running into a lot of problems. can someone tell me how, or direct me to a good lighting resource or tutorial. The major problem we are running into is that there seems to be no shadows on any of our DTS shapes, everything looks washed out and has no depth. example: the trees in our levels have no shadowed side to them. it seems that they are evenly lit from all sides. Is there a way to light them so that they have some depth or do we need to burn the shadows into our textures? any help would be great.
we are trying to light an exterior and running into a lot of problems. can someone tell me how, or direct me to a good lighting resource or tutorial. The major problem we are running into is that there seems to be no shadows on any of our DTS shapes, everything looks washed out and has no depth. example: the trees in our levels have no shadowed side to them. it seems that they are evenly lit from all sides. Is there a way to light them so that they have some depth or do we need to burn the shadows into our textures? any help would be great.
About the author
#2
06/13/2007 (7:03 pm)
There are invalid directions for the sun? 
#3
An AZIMUTH settings of 91, ELEVATION 89 works well for NOON with a slight shadow offset.
06/13/2007 (7:29 pm)
Be sure to use different settings for COLOR (like: 0.5 0.5 0.5) and AMBIENT (like: 0.3 0.3 0.3).An AZIMUTH settings of 91, ELEVATION 89 works well for NOON with a slight shadow offset.
#4
06/14/2007 (7:00 am)
Ok i tried all of those settings but it still doesn't seem to be lighting correctly. the trees cast shadows just fine but they themselves have no depth to them. It seams to me that the color setting is only affecting the terrain and the Ambient only affects the DTS shapes.
#5
06/14/2007 (10:42 am)
I dont think that, by default, torque does what youre looking for. torque has options for setting the ambient light for an object, rendering projected shadows, and illuminating models. youre expecting the models to also do self shadowing as well which torque doesnt do AFAIK. your best bet is to just bake the shadows directly into the texture. either that or write your own lighting system.
#6
06/15/2007 (9:27 am)
I'm not looking to do self shadowing, I'm trying to get my DTS shapes Illuminated. Is there something I'm missing because my DTS shapes have no Illumination.
#7
06/15/2007 (11:39 am)
Are you possibly still using 1.5.1?
#8
06/15/2007 (11:44 am)
Yes we are does that make a differance?
#9
06/15/2007 (12:01 pm)
Yes, get 1.5.2 and all will be good:)
#10
06/15/2007 (1:05 pm)
As Eric said, upgrading to 1.5.2 is practically a necessity for any Torque developer. It fixes plenty of bugs, one of which was erroneous lighting.
#11
06/15/2007 (1:27 pm)
Very cool, thanks guys. we will try and implement that on Monday 
Torque Owner Ross Kabus