Hi vodkamartini,

> As in a place to alter the light parameters (ala Rhino) or as
> a simple combobox to choose between "diffuse" and "metallic"?

I think probably a bit of a mixture.

The current thing I'm thinking of would be to have a combo box which would control a few predefined choices for intensities, something like:

Default key + fill lights
Key + more fill
Key + less fill
Key light only
Custom key + fill levels
Hemispheric

Then a checkbox for "Metallic", and another checkbox for "Specular highlights".

For a couple of choices (Custom key + fill levels and Specular highlights) there would be some additional slider controls that would pop up to allow some fine tuning. (note that this may be one of the benefits of having procedural generation that I was talking about previously).


But I'm still not quite sure yet, I am nearly ready to see if the ideas for this will work or not.


It looks like one remaining overall problem is that with intensities set up that make colorized surfaces look good, regular white models look rather too bright, almost cell shaded.


> If you made the light parameters accessible via the javascript
> interface I can imagine someone creating a plugin where a dialog
> window pops up with preview icons allowing users to easily select
> different custom lighting schemes.

I don't know... right now they're specified numerically by a bunch of angular rotations, and I don't really think you're going to get a lot of control for significantly different variations without more detailed control over the number of lights, intensities of each of them, etc... rather than just altering the angles of the existing ones.

That would end up being a pretty in depth script interface to control all the details.

It seems like it would be better to focus on supporting reading in image maps (in the future) for getting customized lighting schemes instead of that.

- Michael