Lighting category

Other 3D apps I’ve used can control the density/transparency and colour of the shadows. This is such an extremely valuable option I can’t believe its not already in Blender!

It would be nice if Blender had some sort of simple ambient light that would show up in the viewport, similar to other 3D modeling packages. The main benefit would be having more efficient control over the ambient settings, without having to re-render for any minor changes or taking time to place fill lights throughout the scene.

The title says it all, the options are a bit of a mess, particularly halos. When you select halo the options are spread all over the panel AND change depending on wether raytraced or buffered shadows is selected. It would make sense to keep the halo options beneath the button that activates halos (and only show up when a material uses it).

to better see what I am describing, please check out the video linked below: I found another app that does this already.
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Light_Incidence.mov


So first off, a gradient node that doesn't need a bunch of color curves to control it would be nice.....but since we dont have a gradient node yet...:

The ability to manipulate the NORMAL node's angle via the incidence angle and/or a lamp's angle or position in relation to a surface(or vertex group, normal group, or even object)

I'm trying to manipulate the normal angle of a cell(toon)shaded node(I can post any links here yet ugh). I want to be able to maintain a constant "lighting" of a characters face by parenting to a bone/null in the "character's-head-mesh" in some form, the angle/position of a lamp. Thus achieving a bit more of an old-school disney like effect of a character able to maintain a toon-like-lighting appearance aside from the background/environment's lighting setup. Obviously not parent the lighting-incidence-angle source would also be useful in many cases as well.

I know you can do a "version" of what I am talking about using layers, however, I would like to achieve this on a per-surface basis. So nodes seem to be the way to go.


I'm referencing the following node structure below(though mine is a bit more complex):

http://www.blender.org/typo3temp/pics/ebfa1d1250.png

http://www.blender.org/typo3temp/pics/bc660eea8e.jpg

Thank you for reading.



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Ambient Occlusion yet is very noisy. You almost can´t get it "clean". Also it doesn´t get really dark sometimes...?