light on all sides in 3D

[Anonymous]

This is a newbie question.

When I'm working in an axonometric window checking and editing my model the sides away from the sun source are dark. I've tried messing around with the sun settings ("Sunlight Intensity"=70%, "Contribution to Ambient"=20%, "Ambient Intensity"=80%).

Is there a way to have light shine on all sides at once... or to quickly move the sun around (maybe with a Palette)? It's hard to see my model and it's slow to keep opening the Sun dialog to change every couple seconds.

Btw, my walls are Paint-03 Gray and I'm using the OpenGL 3D engine.

Thanks for any tips and techniques.

[R Muller]

Thanks, guys. It's like magic. The camera just appears! I hadn't figured this out from any of the documentation.

Next step: to figure out how to store the sun settings, so I can render each view at the most appropriate time of day. As I understand it, sun settings are stored with cameras but not with views. The view stores everything else having to do with the rendering settings. So, I need both a camera and a view in order to have reproducible rendering results. Is this correct?

[Link]

Yes it is like magic, except if your camera tool is set to VR Object or VR Scene, and that option doesn't appear. Just something to be aware of.

3D Views will store all the 3D Settings, so it is the view that remembers the sun settings, not the camera. A camera will remember the last one used, whereas multiple views will remember multiple sun settings. Your 3D views should come from a camera (so that the position can be recalled and changed at any time), but they don't necessarily have to come from different cameras.

Cheers,
Link.

[Anonymous]

R wrote:
I hadn't figured this out from any of the documentation...

The time spent just experimenting with the menu commands to see what happens will usually be repaid a thousand times. It isn't all in the manual.

[R Muller]

Thanks for the info, but pardon me if I seem a bit dense.

If the sun setting is stored with my 3D view, how come whenever I generate the view, then show Perspective settings/ More Sun all I see in the Sun window is the information I last used to set the sun for some other camera, not the information that is supposedly stored with this camera?

For example, one view was set up for the sun to be at 2:00 PM, and the preview diagram seems to show the correct angle. The altitude and azimuth may be correct in the Perspective Settings window, but they are meaningless numbers to me. I think in terms of time of day and time of year. When I click on More Sun to see what these are it shows the time is 9:00 AM. Not only that, the intensity and color in the Sun dialog box is different than the way I remember setting it.

I have over 20 stored views, and can't figure out a way to check them to verify the sun intensity and ambient intensity without setting each one all over again. I am trying to learn Lightworks (I have Dwight's book), but I'm getting totally tripped up on these seemingly elementary things.

What am I missing?

[Link]

Looks like you've found a bug where the Sun Settings dialog does not recall the last accessed view's setting. The view works just fine, but not the Sun Setting dialog. I'll report it for you.

Cheers,
Link.

[Anonymous]

Doug wrote:
This is a newbie question.

When I'm working in an axonometric window checking and editing my model the sides away from the sun source are dark. I've tried messing around with the sun settings ("Sunlight Intensity"=70%, "Contribution to Ambient"=20%, "Ambient Intensity"=80%).

Is there a way to have light shine on all sides at once... or to quickly move the sun around (maybe with a Palette)? It's hard to see my model and it's slow to keep opening the Sun dialog to change every couple seconds.

Btw, my walls are Paint-03 Gray and I'm using the OpenGL 3D engine.

Thanks for any tips and techniques.

Sorry for dragging up an oldish thread, but I may have figured out a work around for the problem described.

I was having problems too with very dark (black) textures on the sides of the building in shadow especially on an already dark texture.

I noticed if you adjust the emission colour to something just a bit lighter than black, the texure becomes visible again in the OpenGL window. You can also increase the whiteness of white textures too that normally show a dirty grey.

It works best visually if you choose a colour that is close to the materials colour anyway.

The changes will have an effect on how it renders, especially in the internal engine, however if you use the lightworks engine it has separate material settings and the emission can be turned off (under 'Pipeline').

Now, the question is in my excitement have I missed something fundamental? Will this screw up something else I haven't thought of?

[Anonymous]

By the way, this is how it used to display for me.

Cheers!

Pete.