Hi Mike,
> I don't think that there is a need to have anything more
> then an ambient type of light while modeling. There
> has to be a way to solve this.
It's really hard to get a good looking solution for everything using a constant ambient light factor, because it causes such an amount of washing out.
It's not really a problem on flat things like a box, but on curvy things it really messes up the perception of the curved areas.
The best way to do it is to have more distributed lights.
I definitely want to experiment with some different lighting choices in the future, I've added this as a note to the wishlist page to help me keep track of it.
But fancier lighting schemes will probably only work on somewhat more advanced video cards that support stuff like pixel shaders. For MoI 1.0 I wanted to nail a kind of baseline system that would work even on older video cards without needing any shader support at all.
The current method MoI uses is actually a kind of double-ended light. Like if you look at a sphere you will see that an entire half of it isn't actually dark, there is kind of a dark band around the middle of it. This does help to reduce some of the darkness, like in this squiggly surface:
With a normal single-directional light the part pointed at there would be all black, the double-sided lighting helps to show contours in that area instead of darkness. The cool part about this is it still works with all cards.
But lighting from more angles would help a lot, it will definitely happen at some point. I kind of have an idea that it would be nice to have lighting options as an dropdown that shows up on the View toolbar on the side pane. That's one reason why the View menu is there already even though it only has 2 things on it, because I would like to fill it with some other stuff in the future. Like a lighting choice, and a checkbox there for showing edges or not.
- Michael
