pureLIGHT for Leadwerks

[Richard Simpson]

Ah thanks a lot for the reply, I will email you the mesh over. It was a basic cube, but it was 170 feet wide by 1000 feet tall I'll mess around with texel size as I think this was set to 1. woops, just noticed my signature says windows vista still, I'm now running windows 7.

[L B]

Mm, is there any way for me to integrate my terrain in pureLight?

[VeTaL]

Nice question about terrain.

 

Still cant launch pureLIGHT under WinXP: got error "evaluation trial copy has expired"

[Josh]

I think Thomas is finishing the fixes to make the trial version work with Windows XP. Check back later.

[Pixel Perfect]

Looks great, but as Laslo already asked, what's the deal with terrain ... is this just for indoor scenes and can't be used for external global lighting?

[macklebee]

unless you make the terrain a FBX/DAE model, I do not see how the existing pipeline could allow terrains at the moment...

[Pixel Perfect]

That's what I thought, so from a practical point of view ... that's a NO then. Shame, would have made it a far more powerful tool.

[Jordan]

I really think it should have been an add-on that could have been incorporated into the Leadwerks editor. I'd really like to use this for my project, and I think it would really suite it. However as it stands, I don't even feel like the added graphical quality is worth the extra time and effort of even using their tools, let alone paying $350 for it.

 

It just feels like minimum effort was put into this, and they've gone down the route of changing things just enough so it becomes possible to use it with Leadwerks, but not actually worried about it being easy and convenient to do so.

[Naughty Alien]

I really think it should have been an add-on that could have been incorporated into the Leadwerks editor. I'd really like to use this for my project, and I think it would really suite it. However as it stands, I don't even feel like the added graphical quality is worth the extra time and effort of even using their tools, let alone paying $350 for it.

 

It just feels like minimum effort was put into this, and they've gone down the route of changing things just enough so it becomes possible to use it with Leadwerks, but not actually worried about it being easy and convenient to do so.

..thats my thought roughly as well..considering LE to aim AAA class, why not do similar things with toolset AAA teams using, such as 3dsmax, Maya, Lightwave, XSI..i could suggest some nice solutions but since this is pureLIGHT thread ill not talk about it, anyway, if Josh read this, let me know are you interested so i can send you a link ..

[Thomas Pittman]

I really think it should have been an add-on that could have been incorporated into the Leadwerks editor. I'd really like to use this for my project, and I think it would really suite it. However as it stands, I don't even feel like the added graphical quality is worth the extra time and effort of even using their tools, let alone paying $350 for it.

 

It just feels like minimum effort was put into this, and they've gone down the route of changing things just enough so it becomes possible to use it with Leadwerks, but not actually worried about it being easy and convenient to do so.

 

That would be the ideal situation.

[Thomas Pittman]

Looks great, but as Laslo already asked, what's the deal with terrain ... is this just for indoor scenes and can't be used for external global lighting?

 

For terrain, unless you turn your terrain into a mesh that pureLIGHT can read in, then, no, you can't use it for terrain. There's also no standard for representing terrain between various game engines.

 

Probably the easiest way to use it on a Leadwerks terrain, would be to bake the terrain as a giant vertex-lit mesh, and then merge the lighting data in with the terrain height field.

 

Generally speaking, lightmapping works best with interior scenes. Exterior scenes tend to just be dominated by a single directional light.

[Davaris]

I'm not an artist and am fairly new to 3D programing, so I'm still pretty ignorant. So what I want to ask, is what pureLight does for Leadwerks, similar to texture baking as described here?

 

http://www.3dmax-tutorials.com/Rendering_to_Textures.html

[L B]

For terrain, unless you turn your terrain into a mesh that pureLIGHT can read in, then, no, you can't use it for terrain. There's also no standard for representing terrain between various game engines.

 

Probably the easiest way to use it on a Leadwerks terrain, would be to bake the terrain as a giant vertex-lit mesh, and then merge the lighting data in with the terrain height field.

 

Generally speaking, lightmapping works best with interior scenes. Exterior scenes tend to just be dominated by a single directional light.

But then, we would lose terrain optimization, which is extremely important.

Also, I have to mention fantasy RPG games which use an open terrain with lightmapping, and it does give quite a nice effect.

[niv3k]

yepp...this was rushed into and not thought out properly.

[Josh]

I don't think lightmapping is very good for terrain, because you wouldn't get a very good resolution for large terrains. Outdoor scenes with large amounts of instanced geometry wouldn't work well, but not everyone is making Crysis. For more detailed interior scenes, this is great.

 

It just feels like minimum effort was put into this, and they've gone down the route of changing things just enough so it becomes possible to use it with Leadwerks, but not actually worried about it being easy and convenient to do so.

The workflow was designed to be easy and convenient. pureLIGHT exports an .sbx with accompanying .gmf files, along with lights stored in the .sbx. It's very easy to use, and fits right into the Leadwerks pipeline.

[Richard Simpson]

It's a shame this isn't built right into the editor. If it was, and it worked like UDK does, where you build the lighting right inside the editor, I would have bought this with no hesitation. At the moment, with my problems with DAE files, it's just too much of a time waster going through all the different apps to get it to work

[niv3k]

hey can we protest for integration in the editor?

[macklebee]

kind of pointless for you, isn't it Kevin? its not like you are going to buy it anyways This was done for people that constantly complained about not having GI... so Josh works with purelight to give you a pipeline, and the same people that complained nonstop about getting GI, are now complaining because its going to cost them some money or that it has some limitations on usage. Josh is damned if he does, damned if he doesn't...

[niv3k]

hey, i might get some money someday. i just hope it stays the same price. and i'd like Josh to work with more middleware companies

[Thomas Pittman]

I'm Giving the trial a go for this. I'm having some problems with my models though. I normally open my sketchup file in UU3D then export to GMF, so I have been doing this, but exporting to DAE instead. And whenever I start compiling the DAE files in prelight, it crashes and returns this error:

 

I fixed the problem you were having Richard. We'll have an update up in the near future with the fix. Thanks for sending in the sample mesh.

[Josh]

It's a shame this isn't built right into the editor.

The approach we took allows you to place multiple copies of a lightmapped mesh in a scene. I suppose some people might want to build a scene in Leadwerks Editor, then lightmap it and get back a single collapsed mesh, but why wouldn't you just do that in your modeling program?

[Richard Simpson]

I fixed the problem you were having Richard. We'll have an update up in the near future with the fix. Thanks for sending in the sample mesh.

 

Ah, good news! Would this affect the trial though if i was to re-install the newer version with the fix?

[Thomas Pittman]

Ah, good news! Would this affect the trial though if i was to re-install the newer version with the fix?

 

It shouldn't affect the trial at all.

[Richard Simpson]

It shouldn't affect the trial at all.

 

Perfect. I'm so glad you fixed this issue Thanks!

[Michael Betke]

I'm still a bit unsure about purelight after playing around with it. It didnt work for me out of the box and seems a bit to confusing in some parts although I'm used to render programs.

 

But I'll give it some more tries.