pureLIGHT version 1.1.1
by David Chan · 09/14/2009 (5:45 pm) · 23 comments
It’s been an exciting first month of seeing what cool things end users are doing with pureLIGHT. I am sure we’ll be blown away with what’s to come. We have some great news for current and future pureLIGHT users as well. pureLIGHT 1.1.1 is out now. Listed below are the changes.
New Features:
-pureLIGHT baking speed has been improved by 200-300% depending on the scene .
Fixes:
-Fixed a number of issues with importing Collada files from XSI, Blender.
-Fixed a number of issues with importing ase files from XSI, Maya .
-Fixed a number of localization issues .
-Fixed some scene setup issues.
Thanks to the huge brain on our lead programmer Tom Pittman pureLIGHT is now operating at warp factor 3 ;)
We also have some cool new features planned for the next release. How would you like a high quality static preview of your lighting? Of course you would! Keep an eye out for pureLIGHT 1.5. Until then enjoy pureLIGHT 1.11 and have a look for a new level in the Torque 3D build that we built for Garage Games using pureLIGHT.
New Features:
-pureLIGHT baking speed has been improved by 200-300% depending on the scene .
Fixes:
-Fixed a number of issues with importing Collada files from XSI, Blender.
-Fixed a number of issues with importing ase files from XSI, Maya .
-Fixed a number of localization issues .
-Fixed some scene setup issues.
Thanks to the huge brain on our lead programmer Tom Pittman pureLIGHT is now operating at warp factor 3 ;)
We also have some cool new features planned for the next release. How would you like a high quality static preview of your lighting? Of course you would! Keep an eye out for pureLIGHT 1.5. Until then enjoy pureLIGHT 1.11 and have a look for a new level in the Torque 3D build that we built for Garage Games using pureLIGHT.
About the author
Got my start at BioWare in 1999. First project was MDK2 and last project was Mass Effect. Since then I've worked on indie titles and other games like Prey and Splinter Cell. Got my start at pureLIGHT late last year as the Product Manager.
#2
09/14/2009 (6:37 pm)
Thanks Logan. Can't wait to see what people do with it. 
#3
09/14/2009 (6:50 pm)
Good to hear. Isn't 1.11 higher than 1.5 :-). 
#4
09/14/2009 (7:07 pm)
Its actually version 1.1.1... Silly Dave. And I think I know of a few ways of making it faster yet... 
#5
09/14/2009 (7:18 pm)
Awesome news for a most excellent lighting tool!
#6
09/14/2009 (7:20 pm)
Correction made Tom :) 
#7
PL is pureWin on the lightmapping front - even if affording it does mean enforced sobriety for the rest of the year. uhhh ... healthiness, it's a new and alien sensation ...
09/14/2009 (8:18 pm)
@ Joshua - I don't think you can have 1.11 - that'd be 1.2.1 surely ... er now I've confused myself - which seems to be getting increasingly easy these days.PL is pureWin on the lightmapping front - even if affording it does mean enforced sobriety for the rest of the year. uhhh ... healthiness, it's a new and alien sensation ...
#8
I think it goes up to nine
does "scene setup issues" include a transform gizmo?
that would be sweet, right now I tweak position via the text inputs in the properties panel which can be a something of a character building experience :)
09/14/2009 (8:18 pm)
nice, but... only warp factor 3?I think it goes up to nine
does "scene setup issues" include a transform gizmo?
that would be sweet, right now I tweak position via the text inputs in the properties panel which can be a something of a character building experience :)
#9
09/15/2009 (12:17 am)
You want to be able to move lights with a Max type gizmo Haru? That's something we can definitely look into. 
#11
One thing guys, I noticed 2 little bugs:
- If you import a LM into pureLight( like a floor ) and then you change with preLight the lightmap size using the "double lightmap size" the lightmap become very very small ( like a 1/10 of the mesh itself ) and it doesn't cover the entire surface of the mesh, but just a tiny bit ( usually top right on the mesh )
- Probably in this case I'm doing something wrong, but I'm using object lights and I create 5 different mesh to simulate the light coming from the ceiling ( I don't know the english temr, but I hope you got it ). Well, the mesh is more or less a squashed sphere but even a half sphere or with something similar I have the same "error": it looks like the light coming from this OL cast the light like a spot light, infact I have on the floor a kind of brighter circle shape, outside this circle everything starts to become darker...
Can't wait to try the new release!
Anyway I just like to add some notes about pureLight:
- A very useful thing should be, in preLight, to select multiple meshes and setup them to a certain map size, then you can manually change the textel size, but is a bit tedious to do the same thing for 300 objects if you have 100 objects that probably share the same lightmap resolution.
- About the previous point something really good will be a "Change all map size temporarely to 64x64" button, because I usually find out something wrong in the geometry, so I have to re-export my mesh and if I setup all the map size previously to get a good result I have to wait...of course I'm talking about if you have to rebake the entire scene, not a single object, in that case the "isolate" mode ( L, Ctrl+I ) it works perfectly, but when you need a preview of the entire scene with your new mesh if very tedious!
That's all, I'll let you know if there are ( I really hope not ) any problems with XSI.
09/15/2009 (3:54 am)
Sweet, I was waiting for XSI support, but like this is too soon!!!!One thing guys, I noticed 2 little bugs:
- If you import a LM into pureLight( like a floor ) and then you change with preLight the lightmap size using the "double lightmap size" the lightmap become very very small ( like a 1/10 of the mesh itself ) and it doesn't cover the entire surface of the mesh, but just a tiny bit ( usually top right on the mesh )
- Probably in this case I'm doing something wrong, but I'm using object lights and I create 5 different mesh to simulate the light coming from the ceiling ( I don't know the english temr, but I hope you got it ). Well, the mesh is more or less a squashed sphere but even a half sphere or with something similar I have the same "error": it looks like the light coming from this OL cast the light like a spot light, infact I have on the floor a kind of brighter circle shape, outside this circle everything starts to become darker...
Can't wait to try the new release!
Anyway I just like to add some notes about pureLight:
- A very useful thing should be, in preLight, to select multiple meshes and setup them to a certain map size, then you can manually change the textel size, but is a bit tedious to do the same thing for 300 objects if you have 100 objects that probably share the same lightmap resolution.
- About the previous point something really good will be a "Change all map size temporarely to 64x64" button, because I usually find out something wrong in the geometry, so I have to re-export my mesh and if I setup all the map size previously to get a good result I have to wait...of course I'm talking about if you have to rebake the entire scene, not a single object, in that case the "isolate" mode ( L, Ctrl+I ) it works perfectly, but when you need a preview of the entire scene with your new mesh if very tedious!
That's all, I'll let you know if there are ( I really hope not ) any problems with XSI.
#12
pL is one of the most exciting projects I am watching currently. It probably will be the reason for me to buy T3D.
I have read through the manual and I find it very impressive, the mixture of lightmapping and vertex-lighting, the well-thought file options, the lights and the quality rendering.
But I miss one very important feature before I hop in: I would like to have some shaders on top of it (spec-, environment-, normalmaps and so on). Maybe even directional lightmapping (or radiosity normal mapping) could be possible to take all the static lighting into account when rendering the shaders:
http://www.decew.net/OSS/References/sem_ss06_07-Independant%20Explanation.pdf
With this additional option we could even beat Unreal3 in terms of visuals.
I hope you are working on something like this!
By the way: another important feature for a game would be something like ambient cubes to illuminate moving objects accordingly to the static lighting in your world.
Wish you all the best!
09/15/2009 (6:13 am)
Hi pureLight team.pL is one of the most exciting projects I am watching currently. It probably will be the reason for me to buy T3D.
I have read through the manual and I find it very impressive, the mixture of lightmapping and vertex-lighting, the well-thought file options, the lights and the quality rendering.
But I miss one very important feature before I hop in: I would like to have some shaders on top of it (spec-, environment-, normalmaps and so on). Maybe even directional lightmapping (or radiosity normal mapping) could be possible to take all the static lighting into account when rendering the shaders:
http://www.decew.net/OSS/References/sem_ss06_07-Independant%20Explanation.pdf
With this additional option we could even beat Unreal3 in terms of visuals.
I hope you are working on something like this!
By the way: another important feature for a game would be something like ambient cubes to illuminate moving objects accordingly to the static lighting in your world.
Wish you all the best!
#13
09/15/2009 (11:16 am)
moving lights would be great! inevitably, once you see your lighting solution you'll want to adjust it, right now I make adjustments using the properties panels, it's too time consuming to go back to max and re-export lightsespecially when you get lighting results so quickly, moving the lights with a max style transform Gizmo in PureLight would be awesome!
#14
Nick, we'll look into the problems you are having. As usual, if you want to send us a zipped up sample mesh or whatever files you think we might need that would be great.
As for the update, if you go to your GG account and grab pureLIGHT it should be the new version. Just install it over the previous one.
09/15/2009 (12:52 pm)
Great suggestions folks. We are looking into things like directional lightmaps, but that is something we need to work with Garage Games to implement as it requires code changes in the engine itself. We are definitely looking at adding features for the 1.1 and future releases. Keep in mind that currently lightmaps work in both Basic and Advanced lighting, so you can add dynamic lights to a scene and they will blend with the lighmaps. Nick, we'll look into the problems you are having. As usual, if you want to send us a zipped up sample mesh or whatever files you think we might need that would be great.
As for the update, if you go to your GG account and grab pureLIGHT it should be the new version. Just install it over the previous one.
#15
You can already move meshes and lights around with the mouse, though it is a bit of a clunky interface for doing so. Hmm, it doesn't seem to be mentioned in the documentation though. What you do, is under the Mode menu, check the "Enable Mouse Movement" setting. Then, you can middle-click and hold shift to move object's up/down, or ctrl/alt to move them along the other 2 axii (or any combination of ctrl/alt/shift). You can lock movement to a grid in the mode menu as well.
As for normal mapping and shaders, you can use all of the normal mapping and shader functionality in Torque 3D with our lightmapped content just fine. Baking a normal map into a lightmap itself generally doesn't make too much sense, as the lightmap texels are generally far larger than the normal map texels (if they were mapped identically, you could get a good result, but, that's not generally the case).
Directional lightmapping has its own set of problems (mostly with the enormous amounts of additional video memory that they require to get the same resolution of lighting). Support for rendering them would also have to be added into Torque 3D as well.
Ambient cubes are a definite possibility. It would be very easy for us to add support for placing probes to render in pureLIGHT. This would require a fair amount of work to integrate into Torque 3D's renderer (ask Garage Games nicely :) ).
Multiple selection of objects in preLight is on my todo-list.
A bake all at 64x64 button or something like that would be nice. We will some point in the future enable the fast static lighting preview that Dave mentioned in his opening post, which might do the trick better. It basically works like a standard ray-traced render in your 3d modelling app, it still needs some work before its ready to release to the public. (It was originally intended purely as a debugging tool to make sure the rays are being cast into the scene correctly, and so its interface is still really, really clunky. Plus it used to be really slow, but that's no longer the case.)
Those are interesting sounding bugs Nick. I'll see what I can do about reproducing and fixing them here. If you sent us a copy of the object light scene that would be particularly useful.
09/15/2009 (3:32 pm)
I'll try to cover responding to everyone here:You can already move meshes and lights around with the mouse, though it is a bit of a clunky interface for doing so. Hmm, it doesn't seem to be mentioned in the documentation though. What you do, is under the Mode menu, check the "Enable Mouse Movement" setting. Then, you can middle-click and hold shift to move object's up/down, or ctrl/alt to move them along the other 2 axii (or any combination of ctrl/alt/shift). You can lock movement to a grid in the mode menu as well.
As for normal mapping and shaders, you can use all of the normal mapping and shader functionality in Torque 3D with our lightmapped content just fine. Baking a normal map into a lightmap itself generally doesn't make too much sense, as the lightmap texels are generally far larger than the normal map texels (if they were mapped identically, you could get a good result, but, that's not generally the case).
Directional lightmapping has its own set of problems (mostly with the enormous amounts of additional video memory that they require to get the same resolution of lighting). Support for rendering them would also have to be added into Torque 3D as well.
Ambient cubes are a definite possibility. It would be very easy for us to add support for placing probes to render in pureLIGHT. This would require a fair amount of work to integrate into Torque 3D's renderer (ask Garage Games nicely :) ).
Multiple selection of objects in preLight is on my todo-list.
A bake all at 64x64 button or something like that would be nice. We will some point in the future enable the fast static lighting preview that Dave mentioned in his opening post, which might do the trick better. It basically works like a standard ray-traced render in your 3d modelling app, it still needs some work before its ready to release to the public. (It was originally intended purely as a debugging tool to make sure the rays are being cast into the scene correctly, and so its interface is still really, really clunky. Plus it used to be really slow, but that's no longer the case.)
Those are interesting sounding bugs Nick. I'll see what I can do about reproducing and fixing them here. If you sent us a copy of the object light scene that would be particularly useful.
#16
I would like to see an example of a combination of shaders and lightmaps. Specularity should be reduced in shadows. So maybe it makes sense to multiply data from shadowmaps in these shaders.
I hope there will be a demo to play with before I buy T3D + pureLight.
By the way: You are providing excellent support!
09/15/2009 (4:39 pm)
Thanks for the great explanations!I would like to see an example of a combination of shaders and lightmaps. Specularity should be reduced in shadows. So maybe it makes sense to multiply data from shadowmaps in these shaders.
I hope there will be a demo to play with before I buy T3D + pureLight.
By the way: You are providing excellent support!
#17
You can also use the lightmap to affect the amount/specular of the specular lighting, though the more lights you have, the less accurate that is going to be. As, say you have 2 lights, one of them illuminating the lightmapped surface directly, the the other one is blocked by some other object, the blocked light will contribute too much specular if you just look at the lightmap and don't use a shadowmap as well.
For shaders, we are producing a demo map for Torque 3D showing the combination of lightmaps, dynamic lighting and various shader effects. (not sure when that will be available, or if it'll work in a trial copy of T3D) Also have a look at the Hanging Garden's map for UT3 that was produced with pureLIGHT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkJtVNiG_38 or download the map itself over here: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=680370 Everything that Torque 3D's material system can do: http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d should be able to be done with our lightmaps as well.
09/15/2009 (7:20 pm)
Well for specularity and shadows, it works well enough to have some dynamic lights that only cast specular light and not diffuse light. Since specularity is mainly a direct lighting effect, you really don't lose much calculating it dynamically.You can also use the lightmap to affect the amount/specular of the specular lighting, though the more lights you have, the less accurate that is going to be. As, say you have 2 lights, one of them illuminating the lightmapped surface directly, the the other one is blocked by some other object, the blocked light will contribute too much specular if you just look at the lightmap and don't use a shadowmap as well.
For shaders, we are producing a demo map for Torque 3D showing the combination of lightmaps, dynamic lighting and various shader effects. (not sure when that will be available, or if it'll work in a trial copy of T3D) Also have a look at the Hanging Garden's map for UT3 that was produced with pureLIGHT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkJtVNiG_38 or download the map itself over here: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=680370 Everything that Torque 3D's material system can do: http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d should be able to be done with our lightmaps as well.
#18
I know the hanging gardens videos and I like them very much. The lighting is superb (though I miss some textures in this demo, but with these simple materials it is probably better to see the quality of lighting).
If you need any help for future demos just let me know! At Dexsoft (http://www.dexsoft-games.com) we have lots of contents available for testing and demoing. If all works well then I would like to showcase our models and textures in T3D/pL for future packs.
We should talk about details in private!
09/16/2009 (3:22 am)
Thanks Thomas, this sounds very encouraging and well founded. I am looking forward to such a T3D demo.I know the hanging gardens videos and I like them very much. The lighting is superb (though I miss some textures in this demo, but with these simple materials it is probably better to see the quality of lighting).
If you need any help for future demos just let me know! At Dexsoft (http://www.dexsoft-games.com) we have lots of contents available for testing and demoing. If all works well then I would like to showcase our models and textures in T3D/pL for future packs.
We should talk about details in private!
#19
- Ok guys, the exporter for XSI do the job! bad thing though, I can't export any kind of light, basically because the ASE exporter do not recognize the light as a mesh, so is like you are exporting nothing, and by the way the lights type in 3ds and XSI are quite different.
Same thing with .Dae.
- Another strange thing ( that happened previously but I forgot to mention ) is that I'm not able to create lights within pureLight, since when I click "Add light" and do all the setup pureLight just crash, saying something about geometry error...do I need to "attach" my light inside pureLight to a mesh? I didn't try that...
- When I launch pureLight from preLight, after convert all the meshes, everything is fine, but when I enable the "full screen" mode pushing the top right button ( again, I don't remember the english term! ) almost half of the screen at the bottom become completely white!!!!
- About exporting, when I export in .ASE, unless the mesh has a texture, the mesh is exported completely black and is not affected by any light when baking.
- When exported, a mesh with a texture do not retain the tilling ( do this happen is 3ds too? )
Well, anyway I found a good solution so I'm reallt glad you fix the export problems, see ya!
Nicolas
09/16/2009 (3:54 am)
And here we go with some strange problems!- Ok guys, the exporter for XSI do the job! bad thing though, I can't export any kind of light, basically because the ASE exporter do not recognize the light as a mesh, so is like you are exporting nothing, and by the way the lights type in 3ds and XSI are quite different.
Same thing with .Dae.
- Another strange thing ( that happened previously but I forgot to mention ) is that I'm not able to create lights within pureLight, since when I click "Add light" and do all the setup pureLight just crash, saying something about geometry error...do I need to "attach" my light inside pureLight to a mesh? I didn't try that...
- When I launch pureLight from preLight, after convert all the meshes, everything is fine, but when I enable the "full screen" mode pushing the top right button ( again, I don't remember the english term! ) almost half of the screen at the bottom become completely white!!!!
- About exporting, when I export in .ASE, unless the mesh has a texture, the mesh is exported completely black and is not affected by any light when baking.
- When exported, a mesh with a texture do not retain the tilling ( do this happen is 3ds too? )
Well, anyway I found a good solution so I'm reallt glad you fix the export problems, see ya!
Nicolas
#20
-I wasn't aware of any differences between lights in 3ds and xsi. If you could send us a sample of the xsi equivalent of a point light, spot light and directional light, that would be appreciated.
-The add light error in pureLIGHT is interesting. I've never seen anything like that happen before. There's nothing like attaching lights to meshes.
-Are you running version 1.1.1 of pureLIGHT? This sounds like a bug I fixed in it.
-Could you send us examples of the meshes without a texture and that aren't retaining the tiling from xsi? The tiling sounds like an exporter level issue.
09/16/2009 (12:18 pm)
Hey Nick:-I wasn't aware of any differences between lights in 3ds and xsi. If you could send us a sample of the xsi equivalent of a point light, spot light and directional light, that would be appreciated.
-The add light error in pureLIGHT is interesting. I've never seen anything like that happen before. There's nothing like attaching lights to meshes.
-Are you running version 1.1.1 of pureLIGHT? This sounds like a bug I fixed in it.
-Could you send us examples of the meshes without a texture and that aren't retaining the tiling from xsi? The tiling sounds like an exporter level issue.
Associate Logan Foster
perPixel Studios