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Field Researcher
Original Poster
#1 Old 4th Nov 2017 at 1:39 AM Last edited by The Regal Sim : 4th Nov 2017 at 2:33 AM.
Backface culling, and lighting issues
Hello everyone!

So I have 2 issues,

I made this ceiling mural which I am quite proud of, with the help of my friend TheJim



While it looks perfect here, I'm having an issue with lighting. FYI This is one solid object. There is no ceiling above it in the picture taken above thus its getting lit from the sunlight which looks great, however as soon as I build a ceiling above it my mural gets dark, and no amount of lights that I place around it will light the underside up just the top.....


So I'm looking to figure out how to prevent it from getting dark, I don't know how the lighting interacts with objects or faces in this game too much, what's interesting is the chandelier you see in the picture above.... or any light I use for that matter.... the light it produces will show up on the ceiling, or on the top of my mesh, but the underside doesn't light up at all and it stays dark ...... one thing I did notice however is I decided to place a small lamp just to test it out and it did light up the correct side, however I'm not looking to have floating lamps in my room and the invisible buydebug lights wont work. So a solution is still needed!



Is there a way to edit how an object interacts with light?

Troubleshooting I went in TSRW under then in MISC tab I added a light, but I found that made my object glow way too much and because of such brightness it made the textures look bad. I Don't want it to glow per-say but as it looks like the image above where the sun hits it.... that's perfectly lit! I'm not sure how to achieve that. Is there a way to have an object not affected by the dark? Or at least manipulate the direction where it gets lit from? Because even if I could just place a chandelier by it and it lights the bottom half up, that's fine, but as of now that doesn't work as we have discussed.

2nd problem, not so much of an issue as I don't know how to do this in milkshape (or blender) I believe its called backface culling? Basically I want to hide the faces on the top, Obviously you only need to see this mural from bottom looking up, so it would be nice to hide the faces on the top looking down so you can freely look at your sims without this totally blocking your view!

Thank you
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Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#2 Old 5th Nov 2017 at 7:10 PM
What exactly did you clone it with when making it? I guess say you went with a flowerpot, the game still thinks your mesh is around that side and I suppose because of that, the shading it a bit off. Pocci explained in her object creation tutorial on how to change this (See occlusion shadow): http://poccisims3.blogspot.com/2014...-making_13.html

Regarding the backfaces (actually, backfaces are called backfaces when they're visible ) Did you duplicate the mesh and inverted the faces? If so, I guess you accidentally added the backfaces to your mesh
As showed in this image:



If the darker shade is there, it means that it will be invisible in-game. The lighter shade will be visible in game Milkshape should show this off by default already! (Unless you turned that option off of course) If they're both the same shade, then I'd just delete the upper part and make sure the upper part has the darker shade and is invisible in Milkshape

Hope this helps!
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#3 Old 5th Nov 2017 at 9:41 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Lyralei
What exactly did you clone it with when making it? I guess say you went with a flowerpot, the game still thinks your mesh is around that side and I suppose because of that, the shading it a bit off. Pocci explained in her object creation tutorial on how to change this (See occlusion shadow): http://poccisims3.blogspot.com/2014...-making_13.html


Hope this helps!


Thanks for the info! The backfaces were easy to fix! I just never had to do that with a mesh good to know!

I cloned it from the outside decorative flamingo actually, however there is by default nothing in the light tab and its empty so there is no current occulder, I created a invisible lamp, and it works as far as lighting it goes, but to adjust this issue without having to use the lamp, that would still be good! So what's your advice from here? Add some occulders?
Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#4 Old 6th Nov 2017 at 10:13 PM
well, the reason why I linked you to the tutorial to show you the occlusion shadow method, is because it will make the game see that your object has shadows So instead of it being focused on something on the ground (as in right now, that's why the lamp isn't lighting up the mesh because it thinks the default flamingo mesh is still there instead of something on ceiling height) would be a great thing to check out first One thing I forgot to mention is to edit it instead of removing the occlusion entry. In this case, you only want to edit the X-axis and the Y-axis values. I just found a more in-depth tutorial on it right over here!

http://poccisims3.blogspot.nl/2014/...s3-objects.html

Hope this helps!
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