Prefab Lights How To...?

Ricebug on 22/11/2013 at 17:26

Here is a screenie of one of Jason Otto's prefab buildings I D/L'd from his (http://jasonotto.net/) site.

Inline Image:

http://www.bogadocious.com/temp/Otto.jpg

Note how brightly lit the windows are and the pool of light on the ground. There are no lights in this part of the map, so it's coming from the prefab. How did he do this?

I've taken the model apart via R Soul's DEOC, and can't see anything specific. Building a structure using terrain brushes and then placing omnilights near the windows works much better. Still, it would be nice to know how he did it.

Jason must be brewing up another batch of beer, cause he's not reading his posts. (He hosts a (http://brewing.jasonotto.net/) beer blog.)

LarryG on 22/11/2013 at 19:17

Try taking a look at the materials setting for the window texture. My bet is that it has a non-zero setting for the "Emissive" parameter.

Xorak on 22/11/2013 at 21:58

I think those objects are all older than NewDark and don't use material files.

This is from the readme in the zip: "All objects have illuminated textures on the windows. To use them add
renderer>self illumination=1, to turn off use renderer>self illumination=-1."

R Soul on 22/11/2013 at 22:04

Larry is referring to the material settings in the .e file before you run BSP. It's usually done using NV's 3ds -> Bin program. For the material, select 'illum' in the 'special' column.

If you use Dark Exporter for Blender, you can set the Emit property from the Shading section.

LarryG on 23/11/2013 at 00:48

Since Ricebug uses Anim8or and said he had created the 3ds file for the model using DEOC, I was referring to the Anim8or Material Editor, though you can cause the same effect by editing the e-file or by setting the "Special" paramater to "Illum" in NG's 3ds -> Bin program and then specifying the Illum value (0.00 to 1.00).

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1845[/ATTACH]

Xorak on 23/11/2013 at 01:08

Ah, so are the material files for NewDark essentially based upon those material options as in Anim8or or other object programs? But now we can access and alter them after the actual object creation?

LarryG on 23/11/2013 at 02:55

No. Material properties are set during object creation for surface textures. Material files are totally unconnected to Material Properties. Material files are separate files which direct the renderer to perform additional processing on the specified textures. Material files and Material Properties are unrelated except in that they both affect how the texture is displayed in-game, one set when the object is created, and the other set when the need for special rendering is called for. By the way, I would expect that since material files force extra rendering computations that they would be expensive at run-time. If the effect can be created by proper setting of Material Properties, that should be preferred, as there are no extra rendering costs. Use of material files should be probably be minimized to those essential cases only.

Ricebug on 23/11/2013 at 12:57

Quote Posted by Xorak

Odd. My zip doesn't have a readme. Oh, well.

Ricebug on 24/11/2013 at 13:03

Jason PM'd me a reply:

Quote:

there's two occurrences of the texture in the model, from one of them you'll see

1,"Material1",PHONG,TMAP "JOBTrims01.gif",0,TRANSP 0,ILLUM 100;
2,"Material2",PHONG,TMAP "BMedi17T.gif",0,TRANSP 0,ILLUM 0;
3,"Material3",PHONG,TMAP "BMedi18S.gif",0,TRANSP 0,ILLUM 0;
4,"Material4",PHONG,TMAP "BMedi17S.gif",0,TRANSP 0,ILLUM 0;
5,"Material5",PHONG,TMAP "RSlate45S.gif",0,TRANSP 0,ILLUM 0;
6,"Material6",PHONG,TMAP "POld74S.gif",0,TRANSP 0,ILLUM 0;
7,"Material7",PHONG,TMAP "BOldS115.gif",0,TRANSP 0,ILLUM 0;
8,"Material8",PHONG,TMAP "pwall9a.gif",0,TRANSP 0,ILLUM 0;
9,"Material9",PHONG,TMAP "JOBTrims01.gif",0,TRANSP 0,ILLUM 0;

Material 1 and 9 are both jobtrims01.gif, but one has illum 0 and one illum 100. then on a per polygon basis i changed the texture. so the glass on windows that was able to be lit, gets material 9, the window frames and such get material 1. then you have to make the house a light, use the animlight script and set it to zero light. it won't cast light but the illuminated textures will switch on and off.