I'm writing a set of tools for use in cinematics and i'm trying to find out if maya has a certain attribute to help with one of the tools. I was wondering if objects have a way of reading how much light they are receiving. For example, a spot light is lighting an object with a brightness of 3, the object it is lighting…
Light linking would be a very basic way to do it. Just directly referencing the value of the lights intensity... But it doesn't really work well - what if the light is pointing away from the object, or there is something occluding it?
What kind of features would i need in a custom viewport shader then? I'm not sure what it would require. @Brendan - I'm not sure what you are suggesting or how it would achieve what i'm after - care to elaborate? I managed to get a hacky work around going with the light info node. It doesn't actually calc the light on the…
Is this just for like a couple of lights or a lot. You might be able to get the world space position of the light and do a dot product with face normals though again this might start getting really slow especially if its updating in realtime. Bardler's suggestion sounds like a better option.
I was think about this today a little more and was wondering if you could use vertex color? Bake the lighting in the scene to the vertices of the mesh, and then just simply read the values.
Balls... It seems that Surface Luminance only outputs a value at render time, so its not giving any feedback in the viewport. This is no good for me as this is eventually being used to drive a set of bones. I found that the lightInfo node gives you a value based on the distance of a light from a surface - but then…