Meshes and Lighting:

[Daerk]

During MEMod development, we've noticed (and I'm sure the texture artists and modellers here have also noticed) that the lighting in the Morrowind engine seems to be quite detailed and dynamic, however has an odd effect on our meshes, most notably on the meshes that tend to have large flat segments.

 

I researched for the reason and answer to the problem since the effect of light striking the mesh was quite... ugly... and unrealistic. Here's what I found. I'm supplying this information to the public as it will most likely assist anyone encountering the same issue.

I've noticed the effects of lighting in Morrowind's engine when applied to a mesh, and I must say, it's rather lacking.

 

There's a note concerning realism I must bring up:

 

When a mesh is "lit" by the virtual lights in the engine, each face as a WHOLE is lit. This means if the mesh uses large faces (for optimization of polycounts) the whole face is lit by a single light. The result is: A spherical light illuminates a square or rectangular area.

 

To counteract this, we are required to nearly double our polycounts by creating flat planar surfaces as geo-plane's. I have an example below.

 

In this example, the gray lines are the vertices, the yellow lines are the actual spherical virtual light, the red lines are the layout of the tiled polys/faces, and the dim yellowish colours are the faces that are actually lit by the engine when the light strikes the mesh.

 

Notice which example looks more realistic by the shape of the lit faces.

 

http://www.win.net/hammack/MEMod/_daerk_poly_lighting_example_1_a.png

 

-- D

Hope this answered someone's questions/concerns...

 

-- D

[Daerk]

I've received a request to show a blank border around this example to better detail exactly what faces are lit and what faces remain unlit. Here it is:

 

http://www.win.net/hammack/MEMod/_daerk_poly_lighting_example_1_b.png

 

-- D