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 :)

---------

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 ?

---------

Hi David,

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

Actually one of the cool things about this display stuff is that it is compatible with old cards as well, it should work all the way back to the original Radeon or GeForce1 cards.

All the screenshots that I posted are from a Radeon 9600 Pro card which is 6 years old.

I've tested it here on a Radeon 7500 and a Geforce2, which are very old - and actually you should upgrade to something newer if you have one of those because you can get something several generations newer and much faster for only about $30.

I think you would need to go back to about a 10 year old card for it to not work. I'm not sure yet about other than ATI or nVidia cards though, it is possible that some other systems like Intel integrated graphics may not have the support needed until somewhat more recently than that. If a card does not support what is needed, it will fall back to the old style basic lighting and all those new settings will not do anything in that case.

But it is likely that if you have a good enough graphics card to run MoI well now, that it should work fine for these new display options as well.

- Michael

Hi Danny,

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

I'm going to be looking into some options for a "display override" type mechanism, I'll probably be able to fit an option for overriding the color of edges into that.

I'm not quite sure exactly how it will work quite yet but probably you'll be able to edit a text file that has a list of different display modes for things like "Matte White", "Shiny Blue", "Metallic Red", etc... so that there can be a control that will let you flip between these different display modes. The way that will generally work is that each mode will list some properties that it overrides from the normal default view, so something like an edge color property could fit into that same scheme pretty easily I think.

- Michael

This all looks wonderful!

A matte white ("mud render"-like) mode, and something where you get black lines and, better still, black lines with depth-cueing, a la sketchup, would be really nice -- while it'll obviously never be a substitute for renders for anything that has to go in front of a client for real, getting fast, decent looking screenshots is still really handy.

/Ella

I'm definitely THIRSTY for this now!


One question, Michael - how does the lighting look if you're inside the model??

A lot of my models - buildings, docking bays, etc., require me to be inside the model for some bits - will it be like it is now, still lit inside or out?


-Will