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Lighting/Smoothing Error Question(s)

dvatreknerd314

Lieutenant, Junior Grade
Clone Force 99
Joined
31 Jul 2012
Messages
1,363
Age
32
So I'm working on something at the moment, and I just wanted to play with seeing how a particular model will look in-game-ish. I applied a very basic texture with no details and exported it, but upon loading it into Storm3D, I'm seeing some odd dark patches on the ship. I've seen this before on other models and have seen these models in A2 itself without these dark patches, so I'm wondering if what I'm seeing here is specific to Storm3D or if I'm doing something wrong in MS3D. Any ideas?

Notes:

I have only one material, and there are no prefixes/suffixes for specifying lighting types

Several parts of the model are separated into smoothing groups in MS3D, but I don't know if that converts over to A2.
 

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MrVulcan

Crewman 2nd Class
Joined
17 Aug 2011
Messages
142
Those dark patches are caused by the way Armada determines the surface normals for lighting. To make surfaces appear smooth, it averages the normal direction (perpendicular to the triangle face) between all adjacent triangles. Thus, a single flat triangle has different amount of light reflected from it depending on its neighbours. Sometimes, this effect is not desirable when the adjacent surfaces are supposed to create a sharp-er edge, but mesh resolution is not sufficiently high.

Keep in mind that the algorithm used in the armada engine is not the same as in most other rendering software, so the result will appear different.

Also, the smoothing groups in MS3D are not defined in the SOD format. Instead, SOD implements lighting groups.. this is a bit different. Lighting groups can only differ in material properties (ie, diffuse colour, specular level, self-illumination). Useful for when you want to have different material properties, but maintain smoothing.

One way to solve this problem is to break vertices between surfaces that should not "blend" together. This will produce a clear edge, and dark patches will be eliminated. Quick method is to detach the relevant smoothing groups, and then re-attach without welding any vertices. Apologies if the terminology in MS3D differs from 3dsMax.

A better way may be to add a section in the mesh close to the edge with small triangles. Only these triangles will appear darker when the normals are averaged by the smoothing algorithm. The result is more natural and appealing, but obviously consumes a lot more polygons.

Another thing to consider is hidden faces. From that picture, it seems that some parts have occluded faces that will never be seen, but still affect the smoothing on neighbouring, visible, polies.
 
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