Illumination

📼 Also in this series:

• 👖 Kinematic Walker
• 🎥 Operator
• 🏗️ TrenchFold
• 🚧 Blockout Textures

Overview

This extension contains ready-to-use forward shading lighting for 3D games made with Defold. Just set the provided material to your mesh and place light sources on the scene.

Technically it supports about ~200 light sources, but the performance limit is about 20-30 sources at the moment. Need to implement clustered forward shading to get a valuable performance boost.

All the lighting data passed to the shader program as the texture, so it doesn't use a render script.

🎮 Play HTML5 demo with 🔦 on the E key.

💬 Discuss on the forum.

Features

• [x] Linear and radial fog.
• [x] Ambient lighting.
• [x] Directional lighting.
• [x] Light points and spots.
• [x] Everything can be animated with go.animate().
• [x] Support for baked light maps (also can be used as emission maps).
• [x] Support for specular maps.
• [x] Support for normal maps.
• [ ] Support for height maps.
• [ ] Clustered forward shading.
• [ ] Request by adding an issue or contribute.

Install

Add link to the zip-archive of the latest version of defold-illumination to your Defold project as dependency.

Quick Start

1. Add illumination.go to your scene as the sunlight source and configure it.
2. Add light_point.go or light_spot.go as light sources and configure them.
3. Set /illumination/materials/model.material to your mesh.
4. Set /illumination/textures/data.png to the DATA_TEXTURE slot.
5. Fill LIGHT_TEXTURE, SPECULAR_TEXTURE and NORMAL_TEXTURE slots with your maps or set the empty texture /illumination/textures/empty.png.

Illumination

rotation

Affects the direction of sunlight.

ambient_color

Ambient light color.

ambient_level

Ambient light strength from 0.0 to 1.0.

sunlight_color

Directional light color.

sunlight_brightness

Directional light strength from 0.0 to 1.0.

sunlight_specular

Directional light specular component from 0.0 to 1.0.

fog

Adds fog in front of the camera and fade-out distant objects.

fog_is_radial

• true — calculates the fog around the camera position.
• false — calculates the fog along the camera view direction.

fog_distance_min

Distance at which the fog begins to appear.

fog_distance_max

Distance at which the fog reaches the full strength.

fog_color

Used to draw the fog gradient and sent with the clear_color message to the render script.

fog_level

Fog full strength from 0.0 to 1.0.

• 1.0 — not a transparent fog. It can save some performance by ignoring the lighting calculation.

Light

There are light_point.go and light_spot.go. The only difference is the texture of the debug mesh for a friendlier placement on the scene.

position

Light source world position.

rotation

Rotation affects the direction of the spotlight when cutoff is less than 1.0.

color

Light color that will be multiplied with the diffuse color.

brightness

Light brightness from 0.0 to 1.0.

• 0.0 — turn off to save some performance by ignoring the lighting calculation.
• 1.0 — full brightness.

radius

Light radius.

• 0.0 — turn off to save some performance by ignoring the lighting calculation.

specular

Light specular component from 0.0 to 1.0, will be multiplied with the specular map color.

smoothness

Light smoothness / attenuation from 0.0 to 1.0.

• 0.0 — no attenuation at all, fill all the radius evenly.
• 1.0 — standard attenuation from the center to the edges.

cutoff

Spotlight cutoff from 0.0 to 1.0.

• 0.0 — no light.
• 0.3 — like a flashlight.
• 0.5 — half of the sphere.
• 1.0 — no cutoff.

To get the best results, you need to jungle with radius, cutoff and smoothness, which is not so obvious at the moment.

Material

Use the /illumination/materials/model.material material on your meshes to add them to lighting calculation.

It's important to fill unused texture slots with /illumination/textures/empty.png.

DIFFUSE_TEXTURE

A basic diffuse texture.

DATA_TEXTURE

The illumination data texture, always set to /illumination/textures/data.png.

LIGHT_TEXTURE

A baked light map or an emission map texture.

• /illumination/textures/white.png to have full strength emmission.
• /illumination/textures/empty.png to skip it.

If your light map texture has different uv coordinates from the diffuse texture you need to turn on surface.y constant.

SPECULAR_TEXTURE

A specular map texture.

• /illumination/textures/white.png to have full strength reflection.
• /illumination/textures/empty.png to skip it.

NORMAL_TEXTURE

A normal map texture with green on the top.

• /illumination/textures/empty.png to skip it.

OpenGL normal maps format used by default. To use DirectX format turn on surface.z constant.

surface

Fragment constant to pass some surface properties.

• x — the surface shininess. Impacts the scattering of the specular highlight. Default value is 32.0.
• y — using separate uvs for the light map. Set to 1.0 to use the stream texcoord1 as light map uv coordinates. By default it's 0.0 and uses the texcoord0 stream.
• z — use the OpenGL or DirectX normal maps format. Set to 1.0 to use DirectX format where green is down. By default it's 0.0 and uses the OpenGL format where green is top.

Module

illumination.set_debug(is_enabled)

Enables the sun and light sources debug meshes.

illumination.set_debug(true)

illumination.is_debug()

Returns the debug mode state as boolean.

local is_debug = illumination.is_debug()

illumination.set_light(light, url)

Manually add or remove a light source. Don't use it if you already use light_point.go or light_spot.go.

-- Prepare the light
local light = {
    position = go.get_world_position(),
    direction = vmath.rotate(go.get_world_rotation(), vmath.vector3(0, 0, 1)),
    color = vmath.vector4(1.0),
    radius = 5.0,
    specular = 0.5,
    smoothness = 1.0,
    cutoff = 1.0,
}

-- Prepare the url
local light_url = msg.url('#')

-- Add or update the light
illumination.set_light(light, light_url)

-- Remove the light
illumination.set_light(nil, light_url)

TrenchBroom

TrenchFold extension contains entities illumination, light_point and light_spot to configure lighting directly on the map.

To assign textures to meshes use texture path patterns:

• texture1 — /illumination/textures/data.png
• texture2 — *_light.png or /illumination/textures/empty.png
• texture3 — *_specular.png or /illumination/textures/empty.png
• texture4 — *_normal.png or /illumination/textures/empty.png

Credits

• Textures in the demo are from Tiny Texture Pack 1-2 by Screaming Brain Studios.
• Specular and normal maps generated with Normal Map Online by @cpetry.
• The header background picture by Thor Alvis.