Hi.

This is a touch obsessive, but I was playing around with a 3DC image in Photoshop and I noticed something strange.

The light in 3DC are adding to the texture. So a lot of the time the lights overexpose the model.

Is there any way to set 3DC so the textures can be lit by the lights, but won't exceed the light value? So the texture can be equal to the light, but never greater than it.
At the moment if I turn off all lights, I can still see the model. How can I get things to be pitch black?

Yes I know it's a really strange way of saying that, but it's a weird question.

place a black image on the screen and it will be pitch black and would be a lot easier than spending a lot of time making a model that you can't see..

Yeah, but that would just be a pitch black screen.

I'm trying to get a model that is pitch black if I don't light t but normal if I do. So the left side could be bright but the other side dark.

That and real lights don't just add onto the texture, so the 3DC lights don't obey the laws of physics Captain!

I'm not sure what you mean by turning off the lights. You can't turn off the lights. You can delete all of them but one. So there will always be some kind of light. You can access their properties and change their settings so that they cast shadows, etc. You can also adjust the textures properties: diffuse, ambient,specular, and translucency to get the required effect. Light on one side and dark on the other. But you can't turn off all the lights. The following pik shows what I mean. It's a simple cube with a texture applied. Notice that the right side is DARK. It has the same texture as the front.

shadow.jpg (8 Kb, 24 downloads)

Yep. I deleted all the lights I could and set the ambient light to 0,0,0.

With the cube, the darkest corner is still very bright. It is probably no darker than the original texture.

I'm to set 3DC so that, if no light is shining on the object, then it should be 0,0,0 black. If light is shining, it will be let but will not be brighter than the light.

Is there anything in the texture properties that can achieve this?

I'm still not sure what you are trying to achieve. If I take the same cube and then delete the lights and set the ambient light to black, the cube is black. as the following pik shows. So I don't know how to help you if I don't understand the question. Post a pik of what you are trying to do and maybe someone can help.

Dark_Cubes.jpg (77 Kb, 23 downloads)

There is a problem with the lighting depending on which version of 3DC you are using.

V 6.5 series was spot on.
Not sure about the 6.6 series.
V 7 series has a problem.

The point and directional lights seem to over expose the scene in some way.
Ambient light is just about none existent in V 7. See attached pic
Also you can't set a materials ambient setting to 0.

I've reported this on a couple of occasions now, and it's a real pain in the neck for me when trying to make adjustements to textures.
For figure unwraps I build the model in v7, then have to export to a .x file and import the model into V6.5 to get the correct ambient light setting.

I can't find a way around it in V7, so untill it's corrected you just have to do the best you can.
Or try Gile[s]

Bazza

Lighting.jpg (74 Kb, 22 downloads)

Ah. That makes a lot of sense.

The black thing is actually the flip side of my problem. My problem is that, whenever I light an object, it becomes overexposed. If my light was set to 255, 255, 255 then yeah I'd expect it to be overexposed, but this was set to 200, 180, 200 or some other number like that.

Without any lighting, 3DC just displays the texture file normally.

I changed the ambience setting to 1 (as low as it would go) and that improved things a lot, it has stopped overexposing and when the lights are off the texture is black.
I'm glad I still have 3DC 6 installed though.

I'm still getting the hang of Gile[s], reading the tutorials and trying to get to grips with the weird camera controls they have. It produces great results but I'm still a newb.

Thanks for the help.
Reddkryten.