Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!bbn!bbn.com!denbeste
From: denbeste@bbn.com (Steven Den Beste)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Shadows in Turbo-Silver-SV?
Message-ID: <49126@bbn.COM>
Date: 4 Dec 89 18:46:46 GMT
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: denbeste@BBN.COM (Steven Den Beste)
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
Lines: 30

I just got my upgrade disk from Impulse with the latest greatest Silver
version, and I must say that they have massively cleaned up the user interface.
I'm truly impressed by the changes they've made.

There's only one thing I've tried to do which I can't seem to make work, and
I'm now wondering if it is just because their algorithm doesn't extend this
far, or if I'm doing something fundamentally wrong.

One feature change with this version is that you can now have more than one
light source (and objects can be light sources, which is great! - Now I can do
lamps and candles!) and objects will show specular spots and shading based on
all of them. But I cannot get an object to cast a shadow onto another object,
which makes all of the pictures look REALLY strange!

I got to the point last night where I tried hauling out one of THEIR objects
from the last edition, the "cruiser", a weird jet/spaceship, and tried
rendering it over a simple "floor". The fins of the thing cast shadows onto its
body, but the whole object didn't cast a shadow onto the floor.

Am I doing something wrong? I've tried it with light sources which are both
"suns" and "lamps" (having both is a nice feature, by the way), and nothing I
try seems to matter. By the way, in case it matters, I was using a "texture" on
the floor in all cases, though a couple of times I tried a plain-white and got
exactly the same results.


Steven C. Den Beste        ||  denbeste@bbn.com (ARPA/CSNET)
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