Age-Old Lighting Question

Ricebug on 26/1/2015 at 14:40

One picture is worth a thousand words:

Inline Image:

http://www.bogadocious.com/temp/light1.jpg
The room is lit but the lamp itself is not. Add some extra light to the object.

Inline Image:

http://www.bogadocious.com/temp/light3.jpg
A properly lit room.

Inline Image:

http://www.bogadocious.com/temp/light2.jpg
Unfortunately, the lightswitch can't turn off the extra light.

So, unless I use the old teleport swap trick, is there a more elegant path to the sublime answer?

(JPGs used so ZylonBane doesn't have a stroke. Then again...maybe a stroke would be...never mind.)

Random_Taffer on 26/1/2015 at 14:44

I don't have Dromed in front of me so I can't be sure, but isn't this done with the self illumination property rather than extra light?

LarryG on 26/1/2015 at 15:43

NVGlowTrap

ZylonBane on 26/1/2015 at 16:16

You need to fix the model so the surfaces that are supposed to light up when the light is turned on have their material given some self-illumination (the ILLUM material attribute). That allows the engine to automagically know which surfaces of a light source object to "turn on".

Ricebug on 26/1/2015 at 16:41

The self-illumination doesn't work. NVGlowTrap doesn't work. The light comes on but the fixture itself remains unlit.

ZB: My skills at reverse-engineering a model and doinking around with materials are on par with my 10th-grade algebra homework.

Yandros on 26/1/2015 at 18:23

Someone who's decent with modeling should be able to mark those textures with ILLUM as ZB said pretty easily, and then Self Illumination should work properly. Extra light will not work, it will always illuminate the light as yoiu discovered. Actually it can probably just be done by editing the .e file, or opening the model in 3ds2bin, checking ILLUM on the right material, and then re-exporting. But I'm not very good at that stuff either so I may just be talking out my arse.

Ricebug on 26/1/2015 at 20:13

It's that boxlampw object found in the DEDX set. Made by some taffer named 'Ernie.' I'll just do the teleport trick, not wishing to burden anyone.

ZylonBane on 26/1/2015 at 20:15

It's an easy change to make (BINTOE, edit E file, BSP), but only if the the parts of the model that it would make sense to light up -- the bulb and the glass -- are their own texture. Otherwise some intervention by a modeler will be needed. Also a public shaming of the original modeler for not setting it up properly.

Or, the dirty fix, tweak the light origin offset so it originates inside the transparent region of the model. I'm not entirely clear on how the engine handles both object illumination and ray casting when the point of origin is inside a model, but sometimes it's possible to get acceptable results this way.

LarryG on 26/1/2015 at 21:03

Quote Posted by Ricebug

It's that boxlampw object found in the DEDX set. Made by some taffer named 'Ernie.' I'll just do the teleport trick, not wishing to burden anyone.

If the object doesn't have ILLUM set on the texture for the glass and you still you want to dynamically change the property for extra light, why not just dynamically change the property using NVMetaTrap to add/remove it? Teleporting is so messy, and I'm not certain that you should do that with an animlight object.

Yandros on 26/1/2015 at 21:33

I was able to import it using 3ds2bin but I get a bad vertex error when I try to export it after changing the ILLUM on the glass texture. However my installation of 3ds2bin has definitely been hosey in the past so it may work for someone else.