Problem Dark textures - ambient light is low

[george7378]

Hi all,

I am working on a cargo project for the Shuttle-A - a stack of three landers to be taken on interplanetary missions. I have a problem though - when I look at the lander textures in comparison with any other textures, the ambient light levels seem to be very low, to a degree rendering them completely black when they are not facing the Sun:

See the contrast between the Shuttle-A textures? Here's what I did:

- Convert some default Orbiter textures to 24-bit BMP to assign them using drag-and-drop plus a UVW-map modifier in Gmax.
- Convert them back to DDS-DXT1 with different names to put them in the Orbiter texture folder.
- Generate normals for the mesh in MeshWizard.

What could the problem be? Thanks.

 

[Woo482]

try changing the "Specularity" of the material, if that is too low it will look dark. this might help [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=4124"]Material generator[/ame]

 

[george7378]

I increased the specularity to 70% and it has made them more reflective, but the problem of contrast still persists:

 

[Schimz]

Specularity is for light reflection. You sould use ambient lightning (also know sometimes as diffuse color)

 

[george7378]

Thanks - how do change that? Do I need to edit this:

MATERIAL Mtl#0
.588 .588 .588 1
0 0 0 1
0.700000 0.700000 0.700000 1.000000 10
0 0 0 1

 

[Schimz]

Err, Orbi have the two colors, diffuse and ambient.

MATERIAL <mtrl-name> material header
<dr> <dg> <db> <da> Diffuse colour (RGBA)
<ar> <ag> <ab> <aa> Ambient colour (RGBA)
<sr> <sg> <sb> <sa> <pow> Specular colour (RGBA) and specular power (float)
<er> <eg> <eb> <ea> Emissive colour (RGBA)

Change the 2nd line

 

[george7378]

It works

Thanks.