Next pureLIGHT release
by David Chan · in pureLIGHT · 06/24/2010 (10:21 am) · 11 replies
We should have a new pureLIGHT release soon. Not too many feature changes this time around, but there have been some major performance optimizations in the order of 2.5 times for large scenes. Here is some of the changelog for pureLIGHT 1.5:
- Point/spot lights will now be exported into your Torque 3D scenes.
- Added a mode for baking only the indirect lighting.
- Added a mode for controlling whether or not material colors are baked into the exported lightmaps.
- Some memory/speed optimizations.
- Removed Low Detail Texture Mode
- Point/spot lights will now be exported into your Torque 3D scenes.
- Added a mode for baking only the indirect lighting.
- Added a mode for controlling whether or not material colors are baked into the exported lightmaps.
- Some memory/speed optimizations.
- Removed Low Detail Texture Mode
About the author
Got my start at BioWare in 1999. First project was MDK2 and last project was Mass Effect. Since then I've worked on indie titles and other games like Prey and Splinter Cell. Got my start at pureLIGHT late last year as the Product Manager.
#2
06/24/2010 (1:53 pm)
Cool! 
#3
Unfortunately Hans, this is already the Indy version/pricing.
06/25/2010 (3:41 pm)
There's no set release date yet, we still have to put it through testing. There's a bunch of other misc bug fixes as well (the texture suffix stuff will all work correctly this time around).Unfortunately Hans, this is already the Indy version/pricing.
#4
Does that still have the limitations of LMM? As in - if I have a model that has simple projected uv maps, will I still need to make the uv coords be within 0 and 1, and will it matter if there are overlaps? If not - this is huge! I've been looking for a solution to decrease the number of textures on our models by baking them with higher quality light maps. Is this feature something like this?
Mandatory wish list (Some ideas - I'm spending my days and nights with pureLight nowadays, please bear with me :) :
1. Please add the same kind of rotation setting option (can't recall the hotkey) to spot lights as it is now possible with directional lights. Spots are not usable without a 3rd party modelling app right now.
2. Keep original mesh and material names in the exported .dae-s.
3. New feature: A tool/option to disassemble a collada file by material and mesh, and reassemble again using the exported objects.
4. Would it be possible for the create new light feature to:
a) remember previous values,
b) automatically offer a numerically increased default filename so it's enough to just hit enter, and
c) not write 255 in place of an empty field, only if I'd apply the empty value - that gets annoying
?
I also found a smaller issue: Setting the type of an object in preLight twice in a row yields a very long window refresh. Try LM and LM again, or LM and SB.
Thanks for the awesome support. While pureLight looks expensive at first, this is the best piece of software that I've bought since a long time ago. It's fun even. Makes the ugliest geometries look next-gen. :)
06/25/2010 (6:41 pm)
Quote:
Added a mode for controlling whether or not material colors are baked into the exported lightmaps.
Does that still have the limitations of LMM? As in - if I have a model that has simple projected uv maps, will I still need to make the uv coords be within 0 and 1, and will it matter if there are overlaps? If not - this is huge! I've been looking for a solution to decrease the number of textures on our models by baking them with higher quality light maps. Is this feature something like this?
Mandatory wish list (Some ideas - I'm spending my days and nights with pureLight nowadays, please bear with me :) :
1. Please add the same kind of rotation setting option (can't recall the hotkey) to spot lights as it is now possible with directional lights. Spots are not usable without a 3rd party modelling app right now.
2. Keep original mesh and material names in the exported .dae-s.
3. New feature: A tool/option to disassemble a collada file by material and mesh, and reassemble again using the exported objects.
4. Would it be possible for the create new light feature to:
a) remember previous values,
b) automatically offer a numerically increased default filename so it's enough to just hit enter, and
c) not write 255 in place of an empty field, only if I'd apply the empty value - that gets annoying
?
I also found a smaller issue: Setting the type of an object in preLight twice in a row yields a very long window refresh. Try LM and LM again, or LM and SB.
Thanks for the awesome support. While pureLight looks expensive at first, this is the best piece of software that I've bought since a long time ago. It's fun even. Makes the ugliest geometries look next-gen. :)
#5
1. Yeah, rotating spot lights would be nice. The only annoyance is that a spot light group can have multiple spot lights in it, but, I guess, you can individually select just the ones you want to rotate.
2. The reason we change the material names in the exported dae's, is because the final materials that Torque 3D sees are unique per mesh, as Torque 3D has the lightmap specified in the mesh's material (which is unique per mesh).
3. Could you elaborate on exactly what you want here?
4. Yeah the add new light dialog bugs me too. Its not even consistent with the other light properties dialog. I'll probably rewrite that sometime. Those are simple enough fixes/suggestions to implement.
I'll have to test that in preLIGHT and see what happens. Something sounds off there.
You should see some of my ugly programmer art test scenes... they don't exactly look next-gen :) The fun of modelling purposefully deviant geometry or weird little test constructions (some even modelled and created in notepad...).
As for fun, you must have found the secret lightmap minesweeper mini-game!
06/25/2010 (11:11 pm)
That material color setting is to toggle an optimization on/off. Right now, pureLIGHT combines the material color into the exported lightmap tga's that Torque 3D uses. Saves you a multiply in the pixel shader when you go to render (You would have to add that multiply into Torque 3D to render correctly). Though it can be an undesirable thing to happen if you want to dynamically change material colors in engine, or if you are just baking the indirect lighting. (Note on that, you have to calculate all of the direct lighting dynamically at runtime. If you have a highly dynamic scene, calculating only the indirect lighting might be something you would want to do.)1. Yeah, rotating spot lights would be nice. The only annoyance is that a spot light group can have multiple spot lights in it, but, I guess, you can individually select just the ones you want to rotate.
2. The reason we change the material names in the exported dae's, is because the final materials that Torque 3D sees are unique per mesh, as Torque 3D has the lightmap specified in the mesh's material (which is unique per mesh).
3. Could you elaborate on exactly what you want here?
4. Yeah the add new light dialog bugs me too. Its not even consistent with the other light properties dialog. I'll probably rewrite that sometime. Those are simple enough fixes/suggestions to implement.
I'll have to test that in preLIGHT and see what happens. Something sounds off there.
You should see some of my ugly programmer art test scenes... they don't exactly look next-gen :) The fun of modelling purposefully deviant geometry or weird little test constructions (some even modelled and created in notepad...).
As for fun, you must have found the secret lightmap minesweeper mini-game!
#6
Oh I see. It's a great solution when you want to keep lights and dynamic shadows and have them work together with lightmaps as well as possible. Very cool!
Regarding 3.): Say I have a complete street scene. I save it as one big collada file, and import that into preLight. Right now, prelight will make one mesh out of all the submeshes, which is good, but it will also take only one material and use that on the mesh.
So what I'd like is a tool that takes such a collada file and exports anything that is a separate submesh or has its own material into a new collada file - much like you'd export a table in a room as one mesh and the lamp on the table as another one. The room itself would be a third mesh, etc... Essentially, it's just optionally getting rid of the timely export / import process for a complex scene.
The technical side of this is just taking a collada file and iterating through each of its geometries. For each geometry one single material, image, effect, node, etc.. information must be exported. The rest of the data can be gotten rid of.
I hope I made more sense this time. :)
Hehe. It is fun without the game even. :)
06/27/2010 (9:27 am)
Tom:Oh I see. It's a great solution when you want to keep lights and dynamic shadows and have them work together with lightmaps as well as possible. Very cool!
Regarding 3.): Say I have a complete street scene. I save it as one big collada file, and import that into preLight. Right now, prelight will make one mesh out of all the submeshes, which is good, but it will also take only one material and use that on the mesh.
So what I'd like is a tool that takes such a collada file and exports anything that is a separate submesh or has its own material into a new collada file - much like you'd export a table in a room as one mesh and the lamp on the table as another one. The room itself would be a third mesh, etc... Essentially, it's just optionally getting rid of the timely export / import process for a complex scene.
The technical side of this is just taking a collada file and iterating through each of its geometries. For each geometry one single material, image, effect, node, etc.. information must be exported. The rest of the data can be gotten rid of.
I hope I made more sense this time. :)
Quote:
As for fun, you must have found the secret lightmap minesweeper mini-game!
Hehe. It is fun without the game even. :)
#7
06/27/2010 (9:29 am)
Oh and I forgot to add - a new tutorial would be nice to show how to use normal, specular, etc.. maps along with diffuse maps when baking.
#8
06/28/2010 (9:11 am)
There is nothing really special about using pureLIGHT with normal and spec maps at this time. The lightmaps just blend in with the diffuse textures as they always have.
#9
I sorta see what you want with there with the collada files. If you are using 3d max, you could try this batch export script: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/keens-batch-exporter it might make things easier for you.
One thing I didn't address in your previous post, the lightmap coordinates still have to be in the 0 to 1 range and non-overlapping. If the lightmap coordinates overlapped at any point on the mesh, both of those points would use the same lighting, and that lighting would end up being calculated as some weird average of those 2 places on the mesh.
06/28/2010 (9:36 am)
Yeah as David says, pureLIGHT itself doesn't use the normal/spec maps, that's just a convenience thing for the Torque export/auto-material-gen.I sorta see what you want with there with the collada files. If you are using 3d max, you could try this batch export script: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/keens-batch-exporter it might make things easier for you.
One thing I didn't address in your previous post, the lightmap coordinates still have to be in the 0 to 1 range and non-overlapping. If the lightmap coordinates overlapped at any point on the mesh, both of those points would use the same lighting, and that lighting would end up being calculated as some weird average of those 2 places on the mesh.
#10
06/28/2010 (11:15 am)
Just added in the ability to rotate spot lights for you Konrad. 
Torque Owner Hans
The Darkseer
Even though i cannot afford the price of PL and wish i could, is there any chance of an INDE version/pricing coming ?
Thanks
Hans