[DaBrain]

Well, I thought a bit about he the shaders and the way they handle the lights.
Everything but the sun light is based on the vertex level, so it's simply iluminating a whole part of the surface without taking the normal map into account.

So... what happends if I just disable the ambient light and the emissive light (slight self ilumination)?

-no_emissive_light -ambient_factor 0 -ogl_spec 80 -spec_exp 11 -spec_point 0.6 -spec_static 1.5 -spec_tube 0.1

The ships with normal maps look incredible!
I mean they looked awesome before, but they look even better now.

It's hard to catch in screenshots, you have to take a look at it in the Lab, or watch a ship moving in the light. It just looks less like an effect, but more like real parts of the model now.


>High-Res shot of the Orion hull<









On the negative side the game gets a bit dark and the beam light kills the effect (so I turned spec_tube down). Also the red sun is really way too red imho.

On the positive side it doesn't cost one bit of performance more.

[Polpolion]

...

[Gregster2k]

Good lord. Good lord. Good lord.

This is sexy.

[IceyJones]

nice look......but the darkness is a problem i have also in my renderings with the shinemaps. they are the cause for the darkness.....

if i use them as diffusion map and put them to 100 percent, i see nothing with my prooven lighting settings for space renders. i use a big sunlight, one blue light with 40 % for the schadow side and anbient light of 15 %......normaly this settings provide very chrystal clear and crisp renderings. but with the shinemaps they are just too dark....so i only use them 50% for shivan, and 25% for terran and vasudan ships.

vise versa this means that you can try to leave the light as it is now and just edit the shinemaps in gamma. make them brighter......maybe that would be a good compromise?! best of both solutions?!

would be interested in the results....

[DaBrain]

You don't have to increase the brightness of the shine maps. Just increase the -spec_static value. That's the value for the sun light.

And you can also try lowering the -ogl_spec value. That makes the specular highlight on the ships bigger, but also weaker. It's lilke the general glossiness value.

[IceyJones]

i talked about my experiences in cinema 4d there i do not have these parameters available

i tried only to give my ideas reagrding this "problem" of darkness and how to keep this gread solid look of the loki i.e., while lighten everything a little bit up.....

[BlackDove]

I tried it just now. Not sure I prefer it to the default, but it is, I'd say, more shall we say, "realistic" the darkness that envelops the ships. Light isn't taken for granted, which is a

The glossiness though... slimy... I also, well, like seeing the ships, because they're so purdy, and the darkness negates that.

Great settings though.

[DaBrain]

Lowering the ogl_spec value will give the ships a more metalic look, but also removes the hard highlights.
A bigger part of the ships will be lit by the sun too.


I found another small flaw in these settings.
The environment mapping doesn't care about lit or non-lit areas, but always has the same strength. So it even covers areas that are complete black, which looks odd. Maybe because it's also flat...

Not a serious issue though.

[fsphiladelphia]

interesting settings.  getting ready to install 3.6.10 vps tonight, then i'm going to play with this.

[Bobboau]

well the environment map is suposed to be lighting from all background sources, so it shouldn't care about the one foreground light of the sun.