Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!agate!volcano.Berkeley.EDU!leslie
From: leslie@volcano.Berkeley.EDU (Leslie Norwood)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Shadows in Turbo-Silver-SV?
Message-ID: <1989Dec5.004614.25818@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 5 Dec 89 00:46:14 GMT
References: <49126@bbn.COM>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Reply-To: leslie@volcano.Berkeley.EDU (Leslie Norwood)
Organization: ucb
Lines: 29

In article <49126@bbn.COM> denbeste@BBN.COM (Steven Den Beste) writes:
>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
>...
>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.

You're 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!

You're approaching the problem from the wrong side.  It's not the objects
that you have to set up to cast shadows, but the light sources.

When you create a sphere, for example, and select Attributes to modify it,
you'll notice two boxes near the lower left marked "Bright" and "Shaded".
At first, "Shaded" is selected.  The minute you click on "Lamp" or "Sun",
that status changes to "Bright".  This means that Turbo-Silver will not
generate shadows for that particular light.  If you want it to generate
them, you must re-select "Shaded".  It was installed as a time saving option
when you are doing test traces.  (The combination of setting a zone,
making all lights "Bright", and Solid Model tracing really speed things up!)

Happy tracing.