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Hi,
having problems w/ lights : i want to illuminate a selected playing piece in a board game, so i created a light, set it to spot light, positioned it over the piece and pointed it at the piece. it's rubbish :-( i thought i would get a nice visible cone of light but it's hopeles, only visible if i completely turn down the ambient light, then i get to see the top of my object lit up. am i doing something wrong??

KW
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Make a cylinder where the light shines then set the transparency lower. that should make it look like a shaft of light you could also texture it so it looks better.

I think a lot depends on the other setting in your code. I always have trouble with light, but just keep testing different combos until I get the effect I like. Here are some things I know. Maybe they can help:

1) Light seems to work better with textured objects than object using only Color Object.
2) Seems like you understand Ambient light like I do: Turn it down for more shadows, turn it up for less.
3) Ambient sets the color an object reflects based on exposure to ambient light
4) Specular set the reflective color based on a light source.
5) Specular power increases/decreases the reflective light of an object.
6) Emmisive sets the object's own inner light color. Setting this to a high color will make the object brighter regardless of other lights. I've used this for an effective "star" effect.
7) Not sure how diffuse works. Have read the help a lot on this one: seems to determine the object's overall color based on all light sources.
8) While colors are affected by the above factors, it also seems the object's brightness is affected as well.
9) Directional lights are square, not round.
10) It's very difficult to get a single object to be illuminated by a light source. It might be easier to turn off, or down, the light settings on all your other objects, and pump up the light settings on the object to be illuminated.
11) To get a "spotlight" effect, use a cone and Ghost Object On. Then play around with the cone's light settings. Also play with Fade Object.
12) None of these ever work exactly as I think they should.

Thanks for the help people. guess i was expecting a bit much from the light commands. i've made a cone and ghosted it, would look better if you could blur it but i think only sprites can do that. odd thing, i created the cone in Milkshape and gave it some red lighting, then when i was messing in DBP i did a COLOR OBJECT 1,blue, and it lost all it's color. something to do w/ diffuse light or such like, it says in the book. i think i should create a new cone w/ a plain white texture and see if that works, hopefully i can still assign emmissive light etc.

thanks again

edit - while i been messing about w/ my code i've noticed another odd quirk. i LOAD OBJECT my bits and pieces, create my matrix board and display it : but it seems to placing all the objects in the same place
in game space, despite me not doing any POSITION OBJECT commands. is this usual??


KW
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