DeleD Community Edition

[chronozphere]

Hi everyone

I was wondering. Does DeleD support Diffuse and Specular colors??
I will need them in my current project, and i was wondering whether deled would support this. if it does, is it in the LITE version also??

Thanx in advance.

[Paul-Jan]

Nope, DeleD does not support vertex colors at all. Lights have a specular and diffuse color, but that's about it. The rest is all textures and lightmaps.

Out of curiosity, what will you be using them for in your current project?

[chronozphere]

{doublepost}

[chronozphere]

I found diffuse and specular quite usefull.

Some examples:
>> Hardcoded lights in the enviroment.
>> Simple way of giving color to objects
>> Use Diffuse.Alpha to make parts of your geometry transparent for e.g glass and water.

When you create an object, It would be cool to assign a random color to it. It's a nice way to easily distinguish objects in your scene. 3DS Max uses this too if i'm not mistaking.

It also allows us to reuse textures. Some textures for e.g grass can be made yellow with Diffuse. This will result in dry grass without having to create another texture. You can also create many kinds of rock using one texture.
The possebilities are endless.

I think this would be a good feature request.
Maybe this topic should be moved.

Thanx.

[Paul-Jan]

(thread moved)

Interesting request. To get a little discussion going, here is one point of view (net nessecarely mine):

For hardcoding lights, I'd use lightmaps. Per-vertex lighting is so... 90's

For coloring objects or reusing textures, I'd simply create another material for that texture with a different color (*). Micomanaging vertex colors is a real pain, and usually those characteristics nice match up (mentally) with the concept of materials.

Why would you choose vertex coloring over those techniques?

(*) Note how this is not actually possible with the current version of DeleD, but will be once we rewrite the material system (soon).

[chronozphere]

Good point about the lightmaps and object colors. I must say i agree.

But i think per vertex colors are still very handy.
It's perfect for creating transitions between e.g sand and dirt.

And for big stuff like whole indoor scenes, i'd use lightmaps for hardcoded lights. but if you have e.g a spaceship, and you want to light the vertices around the thrusters, lightmaps would be an overkill. Per-Vertex lighting doesn't have to look ugly. Especcialy not on spaceships and racecars with underground-neon, since they are usualy hi-poly models.

Think its a nice feature which shoudn't be hard to implement.
Select a few vertices and assign diffuse and specular values to them.
It's that simple.

[Paul-Jan]

I agree it would be simple to implement, but on the other hand:
a) every extra setting adds to the confusion of users who don't actually use all that stuff... and who then accidentally set it to black, then can't figure out why their texture is acting weird around some vertices
b) there is this thing called the 'can of worms' effect. Once we add per-vertex color settings, people will soon grow tired of editing those one by one and want more advanced tools for it.

I'll stop whining now. I think it's a good thing to have and we'll probably add it.

[RussW]

My current project needs vertex colors too. I was going to produce these in a post-processing stage, but it would be great if it could all be done inside DeleD.

[Daaark]

Than you'll have to sto using GL_REPLACE
_________________

[Paul-Jan]

For the last time, replace != GL_REPLACE

[jwatte]

Vertex colors are sometimes useful for ambient occlusion effects, when you can't spend an entire texture on ambient occlusion information.

[Paul-Jan]

Good point (would work better for AO than for lightmaps in general, as AO falloff and overall effect on the light is usually more sutble). But unless you do your AO manually you don't need access to your vertex colors inside a modeler for that . Nah, just kidding, both plugins and 3rd party file formats could generate/contain such information, and it is currently thrown away by DeleD because we don't support the concept.

[RussW]

The vertex colors are also useful where you're working on platforms with really limited memory and can't use lightmaps, like some of the latest mobile phones.

Any chance of having an option to output the list of vertex colors to the dxs file ?

I don't need any access to the colors from inside the editor.

Failing that, is the new plugin info going to be available soon so I can get access that way ?

[RussW]

Ignore my earlier comments.
Sorry chronozphere, I didn't mean to hijack your feature request.
What you're proposing is much more useful anyway.

[Paul-Jan]

Back to the original proposal: As far as I know, in the fixed pipeline approach to graphics, vertex only have one color, and you can tell the API to have it affect diffuse, specular or both (color tracking).

In other words, you can not have separate diffuse and specular colors for each vertex. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me (some technical pointers on how to handle it would be nice).