Point and Directional Lights that can be placed in the scene

Would love the ability to be able to place lights manually in the scene maybe a UI slider and wheel to increase intensity and change colors. The ability to export the scene with the lights for use in game engines.
16 Replies
Zandy
Zandy•16mo ago
Another reason is with big scenes for the directional light to show at all esp inside something, like a building, you have to zoom all the way in. The additional lights would be a beautiful addition to Open Brush
andybak
andybak•16mo ago
There's already two point lights: https://docs.openbrush.app/user-guide/using-the-open-brush-tools-quick-tools-and-menu-panels#lights Multiple lights hurts performance pretty quickly so I'd be cautious about allowing users to add as many as they wanted (especially shadow casting lights). If we ever switch to Unity URP renderer then there is a way to allow many lights with very little cost. It would be interesting to allow switching lights between point and directional.
mikesky
mikesky•16mo ago
way to allow many lights with very little cost
Link for later reference? 🙂
andybak
andybak•16mo ago
No description
Zandy
Zandy•16mo ago
Yes but to be able to manually place them in the scene would be incredible and very helpful. Right now you have very little control especially in big scenes where you have to zoom in. Right now it’s blanketing the entire scene instead of specific parts of it. Even if it was a 3 point lighting system that allows you to manually place them and increase intensity and change color. Would be great for small pieces too. And if you could export the lights as well as placed in the scene on export…. That would be icing on the cake.
AncientWorlds
AncientWorlds•16mo ago
I agree with Zandy on this, it would be tremendous. The secondary light is useless except for color shifts. The primary light is often outside of areas that would be nice to have illuminated. Three point lighting is what I prefer to use in apps like medium, although the spotlight definitely has its uses in that software.
Videos can be added in game, and that seems to be limited by the graphics card in terms of how many can be added and function. I think medium does a similar thing with lights, possibly a pre-calculation of some kind. It won't let me add additional lights at some point.
I can see some portability issues with that potentially, presumably could be handled on scene import (if too much then reverts to defaults or whatever). Being able to properly light a scene has a huge amount of visual impact. Another approach might be to incorporate that into specific scenes. Include extra lights or movable light objects or similar. Example (black scene with three lights).
If we make additional lights addable objects then the user can use or not use depending on their scene requirements. It's not really different than adding a lot of brush strokes or large imported objects, if your machine can handle it you can, otherwise you're going to notice the performance hit. The URP thing looks awesome
andybak
andybak•16mo ago
The primary light is often outside of areas that would be nice to have illuminated.
What do you mean "outside"? Is it the light range that's the problem in terms of this?
AncientWorlds
AncientWorlds•16mo ago
Sometimes eclipsed, or doesn't adequately illuminate objects off to the side of the sketch. A more replicable example would be to make a box using a hullbrush (perhaps with a doorway) using polyhydra or by sketching, and put a scene inside of it. (Like a building interior). The box, will eclipse the lighting source. Movable lights would allow putting illumination inside the box. There's a lot of other use cases, but this one's pretty straight forward
andybak
andybak•16mo ago
Ah - so it's about shadow casting. Yeah - it's weird we're using point lights but making them far away. Usually you'd use directional lights for that. I wonder what the reasoning was. @captainxap - can you shed any light (heh...) on this?
CaptainXap
CaptainXap•16mo ago
The lighting was already done when I joined the team, except for the lighting panel, which Joyce Lee did. I'm afraid I know very little about it. I do feel we will inevitably have to move over to URP at some point, though.
AncientWorlds
AncientWorlds•16mo ago
Possible to globally disable shadow casting as an option? ]
andybak
andybak•16mo ago
Not currently but if we did allow light customization then allowed shadow casting to be switchable would be an obvious feature
AncientWorlds
AncientWorlds•16mo ago
If we do something with scene building might be able to enable adding lights that way? Haven't figured out how to edit them yet, because it looks like it's mostly gradiant scripted and can't figure out how to add/remove objects in the unity side and not break things
WillowmoonArt
WillowmoonArt•5mo ago
This would be a great feature...often it's not possible to get the textures on imported models to look good with the existing lighting setup, many come in very dark. If there was even one light that you could place in the scene to point it at something to make the textures show up better it would help a lot!
AncientWorlds
AncientWorlds•5mo ago
Another interesting option that treating them as objects would bring, might be the ability to associate them with camera paths. Either to directly light the camera view area, like a flashlight, or to create moving illumination.
Not sure if this would be insanely render heavy, although would certainly be cool for doing things like running a camera around an object Another related idea, would be something like the disco light script. Would be nice to place that as an object in a scene or have a button to activate it