Lighting For Meshers

 

 

 

For Meshers Only (3DMax specific) Derivers feel free to skip this brain exploding bit.

 

Rooms and now Furniture and Accesories can have two types of embedded lighting.

 

3DMax Room Guts

 

 

Omni Light

 

Omni light is a point source light that will radiate from that point in all directions. This light has no fall-off/decay, it will render at full intensity across the whole room. Think of it as a light bulb radiating in all directions

 

How an Omni Light will render

 

 

Spot Light

 

First know this is a spot light in name only, it will not render as a spot in IMVU. A Spot light is a directional source light with no point source that will shoot light all in one direction across the whole room. This light has no fall-off/decay, it will render at full intensity across the whole room. Think of it as a far off distinct sun that is so far away we don’t really see it as a point source, just the rays of it.

 

How a Spot Light will render

 

 

Adding Lights in 3DMax

Lights can easily be added to your max file through the 3DMax tools.

Select ‘Create’ then ‘Lights’ and Pick the ‘Standard’ option. There you will see ‘Target Spot’ and ‘Omni’. Select the one you wish click and drop into your workspace. Select the light object then go into ‘Modify’ mode to edit its color settings

 

Omni and Target spot options

 

 

Light Naming conventions

 

Be sure to name your lights properly so IMVU recognizes them.

 

Omni01
Spot01
Spot01.Target

 

 

Parenting

 

By default lights should be children of the ‘node.Room’. For furniture parent them to the ‘Root’ node. If needed they can also be parented to additional bones in the hierarchy.

 

 

 

Color

 

A lights color is adjusted by selecting the light and then in the intensity drop down, click on the color box. Whatever color you pick is what you light will cast.

To strengthen or weaken the light change the brightness of the hue you are using for its illumination setting. Add more black makes it seem dimmer, more white makes it brighter. Remeber though if the ambient room light in Create Mode is set to white you really won’t see anything.

 

 

 

If needed you can also manually adjust a lights Red Green Blue color value in the xsf file.

A value of 1.0 is 100%, 0.5 50%, 0.0 Zero

 

Omni Lights RGB settings in an .xsf

 

 

 

Export

 

If you have parented correctly your lights will export when you export your xsf.

 

Lagoramma Warning

 

Rooms used to have a two light limit to them. I am not sure what the new caps are, if there even are any, just be very mindful that rendering lighting is a very lag inducing factor, so always use lights conservatively for smother running products.