More DS qestions: Vertex Colors

Sage

I was wondering how these are used to light a model. Are the textures painted with one set of shading and then darken with vertex colors to create the full illusion of lighting? Not sure how to ask what I mean but any feedback on how you use vertex colors for lighting would be nice. Thanks.

Alex

fade1

metroid prime hunters is a good example of vertex lightning. most of the textures are pretty light greys and then colored+lighted with vertex colors.
i wouldn't suggest this for charcters or game models, but for static environment it's a good option.

Steve Schulze

You tend to get some funky effects if you try and use vertex lighting on a very low poly skinned character with lights bleeding around as the thing animates. As Fade syas, you're best to use it on the environment, though theres no reason to stick with greys. We use full colour textures and use vert lighting to add shading and variety to repeated textures. Its nice for things like forests where you can repeat the same tree 100 times and with some clever layout and vertex lighting it'll still look natural.

Sage

Thanks for the feedback. Right now I'll be doing environment stuff. I can model characters just fine but I'm not there yet with texturing characters. Are textures for environments set up similar to the PS2 in which you have a several detail textures on one page or just several tiling textures?

For puposes of my reel I'm going to have alpha planes, how do you get bmps with 16 colors to work or should I just use a separate texture for the transparency map? I don't have access to the nng file format, and I'm limiting my textures to 16 colors. I'm planning on using pink to repesent the transparent portion of the map. How can I set Max and XSI to read the pink as a transparent color? Also what's the best way to get Max and XSI to render vertex colors with their renderer. Thanks

Alex

Steve Schulze

Individual tiling textures are your best bet for DS landscapes. You can add some alpha mapped decals and vertex lighting to break things up.

For the purposes of a demo reel, you'd be fine to just use a one bit alpha (black and white). If you're laying out a bunch of textures for display then the pure pink is probably a good way to do it.

LoTekK

I've been looking through the technical documentation, and you're not limited to just vertex lighting. The DS has hardware support for blending vertex color with a texture. At least that's what I understood from the docos.

DS Specs and Command Reference (Warning, bit heavy)

Steve Schulze

Isn't vertex lighting and vertex colour two names for essentially the same thing?

Xenobond

Well, I know that in Max you can set color (rgb color), illumination (rgb color) and alpha (0-100%( per each vert.

PolyPutty

[ QUOTE ]
I've been looking through the technical documentation, and you're not limited to just vertex lighting. The DS has hardware support for blending vertex color with a texture. At least that's what I understood from the docos.

DS Specs and Command Reference (Warning, bit heavy)

[/ QUOTE ]
well in maya their is something wich is called vertex lighting, but all it does is pulls your light information in your scene to color the verts. So I think vertex lighting means is he computer colors the verts based on light information. You could do it by hand but then I think its just vertex coloring at that point.

Steve Schulze

Ah yeah thats probably right. Vertex lighting like that with DS art doesn't work very most of the time because you're working with some few polys. Its quicker and easier to get an attractive result to drop the vertex colours in by hand. At least thats been the case on all the projects I've worked on.