Skylight for Torque 3D

On a sunny day while standing in the shadow, you'll notice that a blue sky is actually emitting light. I was looking for a solution to add skylight to Torque 3D beside the use of ambient light with advanced lighting. The stock ambient light is not sufficient to imitate the light emitting sky.

Since I'm not very good in writing shaders (not at all), did I came up with a very simple but effective solution: create a 2nd light source next to the sun object. A 2nd sun object is not an option, as it doesn't work as it should, and no spotlight can be big enough to light up entire scene of several square km's. If you mount a light to the player you'll have the advantage of keeping the radius small and emit light in a direction that looks like it's everywhere around, as long as the light object is high enough:


You can see in the image above that it's obvious that you if have objects in your mission that are higher then around 12 meters, you should increase the radius and mount the light object higher above the player.

By adding another light source, next to the Sun object, you'll increase lighting of shadows. This will have the great side effect of normals that were otherwise hardly visible in the dark shadows are now popping out!


[+] click to enlarge

The code

Note: This resource is meant for own implementation. I use this for a single player adventure game with changed source code and scripts. It's not tested with T3D MIT 3.5 and over network. The code below is just an example how to implement this!!!

At the end of scrips/server/Player.cs

//----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// +++ Player skylight
//----------------------------------------------------------------------------

function Player::SkylightEnable(%this)
{
      // spotlight
      %skylight = new PointLight(SkyLightEmitter)
      {            
         radius = "48";
         isEnabled = "1";
         color = "0.243137 0.509804 0.843137 1";
         brightness = "0.33";
         castShadows = "0";
         priority = "1";
         animate = "0";
         animationPeriod = "1";
         animationPhase = "1";
         flareScale = "0";
         attenuationRatio = "0 1 1";
         shadowType = "Spot";
         texSize = "512";
         overDarkFactor = "2000 1000 500 100";
         shadowDistance = "48";
         shadowSoftness = "0.5";
         numSplits = "1";
         logWeight = "0.9";
         fadeStartDistance = "0";
         lastSplitTerrainOnly = "0";
         representedInLightmap = "0";
         shadowDarkenColor = "0 0 0 -1";
         includeLightmappedGeometryInShadow = "0";
         position = "0 0 0";
         rotation = "0 0 0 0";
         mountPID = "";
         mountNode = "3";
         mountPos = "0 0 0";
         mountRot = "0 0 0 0";
         canSave = "1";
         canSaveDynamicFields = "1";
      };
      %this.mountobject(%skylight, 0, "0.0 0.0 24.0"); // mountobject(%obj, mountNode, mountOffset)
      %this.light = %skylight;
}

//----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The colour in the example is blue, but you could turn it into a var and make it for perhaps the same as your "canvas clear colour". The shadows are turned off of the sake of fps.

I have a separate server script for environment stuff, so I put in in there.
Of course you can put it somewhere else as long as it is executed with scriptExec.cs

Name you sun object in your missions "TheSun" if you're using the following code:

in scrips/server/Enviroment.cs

//----------------------------------------------------------------------------

function skyLight(%client)
{
   if(isObject(TheSun))
   {
      %player = %client.player;
      %player.SkylightEnable();
      echo("Skylight enabled");
   }
}

//----------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can turn on the skylight when player is entering the game. I created custom game types, in this case "AdventureGame", and only turn it on when needed. You can create a copy of deathMatch.cs and make sure it's executed with scriptExec.cs

in yourGameType.cs

function yourGameType::onClientEnterGame(%game, %client)
{
	parent::onClientEnterGame(%game, %client);
	skyLight(%client);
}

But of course are there other/better ways to do this! I'm not a coder so tips and fixes are surely welcome.

Good luck!