Has anyone played around with setting up lighting in Blender to mimic the rendering capabilities of older, non-BGE, games?
Just for reference: the game in question runs on DirectX and does not support specular or normal maps, although obviously it does still use vertex normals to get basic Gouraud shading.
Basically I would like to set up game assets in Blender, so that I can see how new textures will look without having to load them into the game all the time. Obviously I can load the suckers into Blender just fine. It’s mimicking the game lighting that’s the tricky bit, because that changes the colour balance and several other things.
Does anyone know of any tips on how to start with this?
Thought of something else, which I should have mentioned in the OP. I’m after a solution which works in Materials view. It has to, because the idea is to speed up workflow, and render view is simply too slow. I would spend all my time waiting for things to render, which means it wouldn’t be an advance over having to load things into the game and run them live.
I think you meant point it straight down. Straight up gives a rather weird effect. Nonetheless, thanks for the tip. That’s got me off to a good start. I think I can get it pretty close from here.
Just in case anyone else needs to do something similar: as well as using the blue hemi* I threw a large cube around the ground plane, then cut out the top and bottom faces. Gave that a basic sky blue material** with specular set to 0. Frigged around with ground/ballast/rails materials a bit.
It’s not too far off already. Will frig around with it a bit more and see how close I can get it.
*Colour #889EAE, brightness 22, Z 300.
** Colour #608DAE as a basic middle of the day starting point, colour picked from a game screenshot.
And yes this is pretty basic skinning. Old game engine. Limited capabilities.
