HOWTO: make simple static lighting simply

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

I am to lazy to make a tutorial of this with pretty pictures and stuff, so first, the example .blend file:
http://home.earthlink.net/~nwinters99/BlenderStuff/lighting_test1.blend

mini-tut for that file:

  • open it (I made it in blender 2.31 but it works fine in blender publisher)
  • go into textured (aka potatoe, alt+z) mode
  • go to the edit buttons
  • and press the make vertex colors button (it is a button labeled Make - next to text that says Vertex Colors)
  • marvel as the lighting you saw in shaded (control+z) mode is applied to the vertex colors and is made visible in textured mode

ok, so the full technique is as follows:

  • create your environment however you wish *
  • give it a material with spec = 0.0 (odd defects if it isn’t)
  • light it however you like, keep in mind that some lamp types go on to infinity, and that you will not get shadows directly from this technique (you will get exactly what you see in the shaded [control+z] preview)
  • I find lamps with sphere turned on very nice because they don’t go on forever, and by tweaking the dist value you can tweak how far they go
    (also, adjust quat1 and quat2 allows you to adjust the fallof)
  • texture your environment
  • press the make vertex colors button in the edit buttons

NOTES:

you can change the lighting and press that button again however many times you like. However it appears you must enter shaded (control+z) mode at least once before you press that button or else your changes will not take effect (is this a bug?)

Area lamps (new as of yesterday[?]) seem to have the same preview as regular lamps.

  • My technique for creating environments that I would do something like this with has an additional requirement: I must be able to set smooth the entire mesh and still get the seams in the right spot. I do this by seperating (y key) parts of the mesh I want seams around, and to allow me to continue I usually hide them as I go along. This requires me to select individual walls and stuff with the l key (I can’t just select the verts anymore), but it works well with the radiosity solver and this method by not further duplicating the verticies (radiosity duplicates verticies on solid mode faces when they are subdivided) and allows me to use the vertex-paint-smoothing technique to fix errors that may be introduced by the “make vertex colors” button. This vertex-paint-smoothing techinque averages vertex colors on each vertex. It is simple: enter vertex paint mode and paint on your mesh with a 0 opacity brush, the colors will be averaged over each vertex. (I need to find a way to explain that better)[/list]
2

I am sure few actrally know hits :slight_smile: could not explain it any better

3

Nice technic, but does it slower games? I mean is it tested to see if it has a bad influence on the fps? :-?

4

Hello

This is a nice technique to fastly apply nice light/shadows to you scene
Unfortunately don’t cast shadows
I guess that this don’t affect the FPS cause it’s “only” vertex colors

The shortcuts are V then W to share vertex colors and V again

Blengine have a nice variationtut on his site
Bye

5

it “does” affect the FPS since the vertex colors need to be calculated.

6

ok, so your graphics card must do a little more work to multiply a number that isn’t 1 nor 0 with another number. [all I pointed out here is a more user-friendly way to set the vertex colors, paintint is difficult] This is less demanding (and better results) than dynamic lighting. Whatever method you choose your video card will have to combine texture colors with vertex colors (by multiplying them). The speed difference is insignificant

(again in bold text)

THE SPEED DECREASE IS INSIGNIFICANT

Cool, I didn’t know that. Don’t have to paint with transparent brush any more…