Question Controlling Glossiness/Shininess of Materials

[Spike Spiegel]

I'm using 3DS Max to create my model and I've created some materials. Some of them use textures, some are plain materials. I'm using the max2msh plugin to export.

I've noticed that the materials appear to be much more glossy or shiny in Orbiter than they appear in 3DS Max, so I'm wondering how the different settings of the materials contribute to the appearance of the material in Orbiter.

Specifically, how do the Ambient and Diffuse colors, the Specular color, and the Specular Level and Glossiness settings affect the glossiness of the surface in Orbiter? I did notice that when the Ambient and Diffuse colors were darker, my texture appeared darker. I also noticed that setting the Specular Level to 1 and Glossiness to 10 made my material almost completely white across the entire lit part of the surface.

So, can anyone offer some tips?

 

[Hielor]

I'm using 3DS Max to create my model and I've created some materials. Some of them use textures, some are plain materials. I'm using the max2msh plugin to export.

I've noticed that the materials appear to be much more glossy or shiny in Orbiter than they appear in 3DS Max, so I'm wondering how the different settings of the materials contribute to the appearance of the material in Orbiter.

Specifically, how do the Ambient and Diffuse colors, the Specular color, and the Specular Level and Glossiness settings affect the glossiness of the surface in Orbiter? I did notice that when the Ambient and Diffuse colors were darker, my texture appeared darker. I also noticed that setting the Specular Level to 1 and Glossiness to 10 made my material almost completely white across the entire lit part of the surface.

So, can anyone offer some tips?

Have you read 3dmodel.pdf in the SDK docs?

 

[Spike Spiegel]

Thank you for pointing that out! I wasn't aware of that document.

I'm seeing that you control the "focus" of the shine with the specular line's "power" setting in the .msh file, whereas in 3DS Max the focus is controlled by the Glossiness setting. Then the intensity of the shine seems to be controlled by the value of the specular color in Orbiter; this can be controlled in 3DS Max with the Specular setting. So it seems sort of backwards in that respect.

I've played with it a bit and I'm thinking it might be tricky to get it right straight out of 3DS Max. Fortunately I'm used to looking at code, so I can always open the .msh in a text editor and mess with it. I noticed favorable results when I tried that.

Thanks again for your help!