Please can someone tell me how to ‘turn off’ the ambient light in the game engine. I have no lights (lamps, spots, sun etc) , I have set the brightness of all the textures of my materials to zero in the colour tab. I have set the world ambient colours to zero. I have tried everything I can find but still, when I run the game engine my building is brightly lit. I would like to start with a dark building that I can then add lamps to to light properly. I know about setting the faces to receive ‘light’.
What am I doing wrong?
Any help much appreciated…
you can’t turn off ambient light… ambient light is just the colour when no light is shinning on a surface… kinda like it’s shadow… having no lights in the game engine won’t just make everything dark… you need to have a light to see lighting… as in going from light areas to not lit areas… the engine use vertex shading to do this… so it shades from one vertex to another… hence more vertices = better lighting… but more vertices slows things down…
by setting the world ambient colour RGB to 0,0,0 you are just setting it to black… if you set the material ambient slider to 0 it means it’s not mixing any of the global (world) ambient colour with that of your material… usually you want the ambient to be black.
just put in an object with a blender material… and make sure the world ambient colour is black… and that you obeject has enough vertices to light correctly and it should work… but you must have at least one light to see the shading…
Thanks for the explanation. That has helped me a bit. What I really wanted to do was to have lights that looked like lights and I seem to be really stuck here. In the 3d walkthrough demo there seem to be a set of lights that look realistic - any pointers for achieving this in my walkthrough?
You want particle effects, which in the BGE you have to fake with a halo texture.
You can render one yourself with blender, using a black background. Then you just slap the image on a plane, set that plane to halo, and enable “ADD” in the texture face buttons.
Type in “particle effects” (no quotes) in the forum search engine, and you should get back various threads dealing with that issue.
Also, be sure to check the stickies, for a tutorial.
PS: You should be aware, that even though the “lights” look real due to particle effects, particles are not responsible for the realistic lighting you see there. The walkthrough demo uses a method called “radiosity” to produce that smooth lighting that you no doubt are trying to reproduce. So you might want to additionally research radiosity as well.