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

Gotcha. I like the variety of options you're planning, and it sounds like you're trying to make it more user friendly than Rhino's vector + diffuse + spec inputs.




In terms of a scripting interface, my first thought would have been to just accept an array of light objects that you can loop through. So javascript-wise the above rhino settings might look something like:

lights = [];
lights[0] = {
    direction: {x: 1, y: 0.8, z: -0.5},
    color: {r: 214, g: 214, b: 214},
    spec: {r: 146, g: 146, b: 146}
};
lights[1] = {
    direction: {x: -1, y: -0.5, z: 0},
    color: {r: 0, g: 0, b: 0},
    spec: {r: 115, g: 115, b: 115}
};
lights[2] = {
    direction: {x: -1, y: -0.8, z: 0.5},
    color: {r: 100, g: 100, b: 100},
    spec: {r: 0, g: 0, b: 0}
};
moi.lightingEngine.setLights(lights);

Of course your lights might have different properties than Rhino's depending on the types you allow (point, directional, spot, etc). Anyway, it's not a big deal in the end. I was just tossing out an idea since you were working in that area.

Hi vodkamartini,

> and it sounds like you're trying to make it more user
> friendly than Rhino's vector + diffuse + spec inputs.

Yes, definitely! The one that you show there is kind of a disaster as far as usability is concerned.

You actually could not even do the one I'm currently messing with in MoI there because it's made up of 12 lights - 1 key light, then 10 low intensity fill lights distributed evenly between 2 locations, and then one additional fill.

It can help a lot to have some distributed ranges of lights, and it's not so convenient to try and manage a bunch of those individually listed in a dialog.

What I'm hoping to do is to have 2 sliders which you can adjust, one for the intensity of the key light, and another for the combined intensity of the 11 fill lights. But I have not got that quite set up yet.

The current script interface for setting the light direction (moi.view.lightDirection) still works to set the direction of the key light and the fill lights will move relative to it when it is altered.

- Michael

And then of course, in the theme of "Lama Mode", you can have a hidden "Disco Mode" where all 12 lights strobe around the dance viewport! :O

Hi Michael,

The new metal looks cool, but seems to add some dark zone on the front of planar geometry ?
I mean the front face of the blue boxes on your example looks really dark here.

Anyway, it's a really cool shading alternative :)

Hi PaQ,

> I mean the front face of the blue boxes on your example
> looks really dark here.

The metallic style one changes in color more rapidly in response to view angles than the regular style lighting, so a fairly small rotation would change the color there quite a bit.

That particular angle is about the darkest that it would get, but also if you adjust the lighting to be stronger it would limit that, but also make for some less contrast in shading on curved shapes.

The metallic style doesn't really feel that great on boxy things, it seems like it will be more interesting on curvy things.

- Michael

Made some good progress on the lighting UI, there are several prepackaged choices but you can also choose to customize the intensities with some sliders to fine tune it.

In addition to the various intensities of Key + Fill lighting, there are also "Hemispheric" and "Headlight" types, here's a demo:



- Michael

Ok! Ok! stop teasing.

Now that that you've got this sorted Michael, is it easy to throw in a few more 'enviro' maps in there :)

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Hi Danny, I still have the specular part left to do, so not quite all finished yet but getting there.

In the future I would like to have additional environment maps available, but I don't think that will happen for v2 though.

- Michael

It doesn't get much better than this!

And I thought I was straight after the surface assignments!


Can't wait for the next drop!

-Will

This looks great Michael, I was content with just your light flip script but you really kicked it up a notch. As far as the custom lighting goes would be be able to save a custom light set up or two possibly?

Hi Grendel,

> This looks great Michael, I was content with just your light
> flip script but you really kicked it up a notch.

Thanks! Actually that old flip light direction script will still work, but yes the idea is that it should not be necessary anymore since there are now multiple fill lights that help to illuminate the dark sides.

There is kind of a trade-off though with more light also meaning less contrast, so that's why I wanted to set up a variety of choices and adjustments.


> As far as the custom lighting goes would be be able to save
> a custom light set up or two possibly?

It's possible to set up a shortcut key script that will do anything that you see there in the UI, so you could have a couple of different keys that would set things to particular values.

Also another idea is that this UI I showed above would be for setting your normal default lighting, and then there will maybe be a different thing under the View palette that will let you flip between some different view modes that would temporarily override both lighting and things like surface colors too.

- Michael

Remember Grendel, Anything that you can put in a shortcut command, you can save in a js file and place a "scripts" folder in the root of MoI, then just type that name in the command area to get it. So no need to fill up keys, just call by your personal name like, "Garden", "Automotive or whatever!

FYI

So any way to capture the current custom lighting to the clipboard or something?

Hi Burr,

> So any way to capture the current custom lighting to
> the clipboard or something?

Hi Burr, well the custom light levels are controlled by just 2 numbers, so it shouldn't be hard to just write them down.



- Michael

OIC. Didnt see those in the video. Will those numbers be the same correlation in the script? When you give one example script after its done, then we could just fill in the different numbers to create the different setups as scripts.

Hi Burr, yup those numbers will be the same ones used by the script.

One of the nice things about how MoI's UI is set up is that the UI always talks to the core MoI code through the script interface. So that means that any numbers or things you see controlled by UI can also be controlled by a custom script as well.

> When you give one example script after its done, then we
> could just fill in the different numbers to create the
> different setups as scripts.

Yup, that should work pretty good.

- Michael

All right, I've got some good progress on specular highlights also now.

Here's an example:



Here's one with the metallic option also enabled:



When you enable Specular highlights, 2 additional sliders appear in the UI that let you adjust the Brightness and "Focus size" of the highlights.

Here I've taken the above one and loosened the focus and dulled the brightness some, it gives more of a sheen to an object rather than a hard looking small spot:



- Michael

Hi Michael:

Could be the new lighting modes a problem with an older graphic cards?

Looking good there Michael, looks like your bordering the rendering side of things :)

BTW will you be looking at an option to have black edges also or is that out of the question ?

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