DriveWorks Pro 21

How To: Create Appealing DriveWorks 3D files (KB17022801)

How To: Create Appealing DriveWorks 3D files

These tips will help you create better looking DriveWorks 3D files.

Environment

Ambient Light

• Keep light level low, this is the minimum light level for your scene. Default is set far too high so you may forget to add lights.
• Keep color gray-scale or very slight tints towards general daylight colors (slight blue for daytime, orange for sunset etc)
• If you're using Image Based Ambient lighting, you'll want this value to be higher, doubling the intensity would be a good starting point

Environment Map

• Use Environment Map must be set to true to use any of these features
• Just enabling it will allow reflections of the skybox on your model (even if you don't enable the skybox). The reflection strength is affected by the material Reflectivity property.
• Image based ambient tints the ambient light by the skybox color, this gives a more realistic base lighting, especially when you're using a skybox.
  • If you use this, remember to increase the ambient intensity a bit.
  • This will tint your model a bit to the color of the skybox which might be what you want, but you can undo this by tinting the ambient by the opposite color. (Yellow-Orange).
• Display Skybox will show the skybox instead of the background color (when TRUE). If this is enabled, background color is irrelevant.

Background Color

• Document background is different than on the control as it's the rendered background color. If this is opaque it will obviously effectively override the control's background color.
• If you're setting this to transparent, make sure the rest of the color is black or it will still tint transparent objects (unless that's intended).
• Using an opaque value here is better as it will allow the Anti-Aliasing to do a better job, and transparent objects' colors will be more correct.
• Try to avoid semi-transparent colors especially if you have transparent objects in the scene.

Standard ambient lighting	Image based ambient lighting	Image based ambient with color correction

Scene Composition

General Tips

• Look for good real-world references of interior design depending on the project.
• Try to add more than just the model you're configuring, Add a small surrounding scene.
• At the very least add a floor, and make sure it's big enough that you can see the full effects of any lights you're using. You can apply a texture to make it fade off at the edges.
• You can add simple shadowing by using a texture of semi-opaque black on a model (cube/plane) placed just above the ground.
• Be careful with borders between materials. It doesn't look good when texture meets texture. Edges should be more defined/bordered; for example if you have a room, don't have your carpet meet the wallpaper. Make sure you add a skirting board to break it up.
• Avoid transparent objects as much as possible.
• If you have to use transparent objects, split the parts as much as possible and don't put transparent objects within transparent objects ever.
• Also avoid self-occluding transparent objects where possible.
• Try to have a 3D modelled light-source for point lights and spot lights.

Transparent self-occlusion:

Lighting

Directional Lights

• Takes the rotation of the node it's placed on. Position is irrelevant.
• Light affects the entire scene from the same direction at the same intensity.
• Generally used to simulate the sun.

Point Lights

• Light affects surrounding objects in all directions from the position of it's parent node. Rotation is irrelevant.
• Light intensity falls off over distance, how quickly it falls off depends on the Falloff Exponent. Real-world is 2, a decent value to use though is about 1.5.
  • Reduce this value when you want the light to affect more of the scene more evenly.
  • Increase this value when you want a very local light.

Spot Lights

• Light affects objects in a cone from the position of the node. The center of the cone is the node's Z direction (blue triad arrow). Therefore both position and rotation are important.
• Light intensity and falloff are exactly the same as a point light, just constrained to a cone.
• The cone is controlled by the falloff start and end angle properties.
  • The light is at full brightness from straight forward, to the falloff start angle. The light then falls off from 100% to 0% between the start and end angle.
  • The bigger the difference between start and end, the softer the edge of the spotlight. If you want a hard edge have the values just off equal, this is free anti-aliasing for the light.

General Lighting Tips

• Make lighting "moody". You want to have dramatic contrast between light and dark areas. Spot lights are great for this.
• Final colors max out at 1, this is calculated based on all affecting lights and the appearance's color.
  • This can sometimes be intended and simulates overexposure on a camera when used carefully. (Eg. inside light fittings)
  • Hitting the limit can make your colors seem off as R/G/B can hit the limit at different times.
  • This can create harsh edges where the lighting gradient just stops.
  • If it happens, you can adjust light intensity and falloff. Lowering intensity AND falloff together will make lights dimmer at short distance while staying bright at longer distances.
  • If you can't avoid it, textures can help make the harsh line less obvious.
• Use a directional light to give your scene a base light level, but don't set this too bright or you won't notice your other lights.
  • You can add a much dimmer "up light" to simulate sunlight bouncing off the ground, color this to match your floor.
• When you use a spot light, add a dim point light too, this simulates light leaking from a fixture.
• When using strip lights, use multiple lights along the length of the light fixture.
• Use colors according to the light-source. There are values easily found online for values like daylight, incandescent bulbs, LED lights, street lights etc.
• There are limits to the number of lights affecting each object. Only the brightest lights are used per object, this takes into account distance to a point/spot light so generally you shouldn't have to worry. (5 directional, 3 point and 3 spot)
• You can still use the control's lighting presets for base lighting. These use 1-5 directional lights.
• 3-Point-Lighting is nice using point lights.
  • Use a white directional, and a blue tinted and orange tinted point lights sat in front and behind the model.
  • This highlights the contours of the model using the color contrast from the different lights.
• Don't use a light to try and light up an actual light emitter like a bulb. Just increase the ambient/diffuse intensity on its appearance.

Maxed out lighting	Split RGB colors	Corrected lighting

Appearances

Appearance Properties

• Diffuse Color
  • Base color, determines the color of diffused light.
  • Alpha can be used for transparent objects. For things like glass this should be set very low.
  • This color is multiplied with the light color.
    • This means black will always be black no matter how many lights you shine at it. As will a red light shining at a blue diffuse color.
• Specular Color
  • Color of the specular highlight that simulates directly reflected light.
  • This should pretty much always be white for organic materials.
  • For metallic materials use the same color as the diffuse color.
  • Like diffuse this is multiplied with the light color.
• Ambient Intensity
  • Multiplier for intensity of ambient light on this appearance.
  • Use this to make objects look like they're glowing. Light bulbs etc.
  • Reduce for transparent objects.
• Diffuse Intensity
  • Multiplier for intensity of diffuse light on this appearance.
  • For transparent objects reduce this to near 0.
  • Mostly avoid using this outside of transparent objects.
• Specular Intensity
  • Multiplier for intensity of the specular highlight on this appearance.
  • Turn this up to make something look shiny.
  • Simulates how much light get's reflected by a surface.
• Reflectivity
  • Affects strength of environment map, the higher this is the clearer/brighter the environment map will be.
  • Makes specular highlight spots smaller.
  • Generally makes specular highlights dimmer, so turn up spec intensity as you turn this up.
  • Turn this up to make things look glossy or wet.
• Texture Scale X/Y
  • Affects the size of the texture, horizontally or vertically.
  • Higher numbers make the texture look smaller.
  • Numbers > 1 will make the texture look bigger.
  • Numbers > 0 will flip the image.
  • Eg. Setting this to 2 will make the texture repeat twice. Setting to 0.5 will only show half the image.
• Texture Angle
  • Rotates the texture around the top-left corner.
• Texture Name
  • Path to the texture to set on the appearance.

General Tips

• Use textures for pretty much everything, nothing in real life is a solid color.
• Use the Texture coordinate remapping as much as possible.
• Use separate appearances and swap between them rather than changing appearance properties via rules (sometimes necessary).
• For all colors. Never have a pure color like (0,0,0)black or (0,1,0)Green. Do black as like (0.02,0.02,0.02) and the green as (0.1,1.0,0.05) for example.
• Specular highlights are reflections from dir/point/spot lights. If you don't add any you won't see any.
• Reflectivity dims the specular highlights while making the spots smaller.
• For most materials, reflectivity should be > 1. For something mega shiny, > 20 but for transparents you want nearly all the color from the environment map. so go up to 20-30.
• If you scale a model and want your texture to stay the same size (texels per meter) apply the exact same scale.
• We wouldn't recommend using negative texture scales, instead just flip your image.
• Using texture angle can add seams to your textures so try not to use it unless you have a good seamless/repeating texture or stick to 90/180/270 degrees.
• Use appropriately sized textures. No point having to download pixels you'll never see.
  • You can estimate size on screen to determine what's appropriate, if you have a preview control that's 1000x1000 pixels you will not need 1024*1024 images.
  • Huge textures actually look worse in WebGL as there is no mip-mapping (this causes a speckled effect to occur as you move the camera, as the chosen texel from that texture at that pixel jumps 4-5 texels across the image at a time from one frame to the next. Blurring the image (reducing size) stops this effect.

Example Appearances

Material	Details	Example
Stone	Seamless stone texture. Low reflectivity, stone isn't glossy. Medium specular, stone still reflects a good amount of light, it just diffuses a lot of it (matte).
Wood Floor	Seamless wood floor texture. Medium reflectivity and specular.
Leather	Seamless leather texture. Low reflectivity, quite matte. High specular.
Gold	Gold metallic color, created by eye - You could find a texture with a few flaws on it, this gold is super polished. Very high reflectivity, super polished. Equally high specular intensity. Color matches the diffuse as it's a metallic material.
Tiles	Seamless Tile texture. Reflectivity medium, rough tiles so quite matte. skybox barely visible.
Carpet	Seamless carpet texture, highly scaled, most carpet textures you find are very magnified. Almost no reflectivity/specular. Almost no light reflects from carpet.
Glass	White color with low alpha. You could find/make a texture with imperfections like dust/scratches. Very low ambient and diffuse intensity. Pretty much the only way you can see glass is the reflections/refractions it makes. For the above reason, very high reflectivity and specular. Shown with skybox because it's very important with transparent stuff to show off the fact that it is transparent by putting something behind it.

Resources and Tools

• http://www.textures.com/
  • Search for the material you want, and look for "seamless" textures. These look good repeated.
  • If a texture you've selected has multiple bits to it. (like albedo, diffuse, specular, normal etc) The one you want is 'diffuse'. Sometimes you can use an 'albedo' texture.

• Use Gimp or Photoshop to edit textures.
  • You don't need any experience to edit the brightness/contrast/saturation/hue, or flip/mirror/resize the image. All quick to do and make a big difference.

• Light values (just divide by 255).
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