 |
This seems like a corner case to me. You can easily adjust cubemap intensity with materials using all the texture slots (d/n/s) via the makealpha stage: { maskcolor map makealpha (textures/mask_texture) // eg. your specular texture or a dedicated mask alpha .2 // modify it as needed } { blend gl_dst_alpha, gl_one maskalpha cameraCubeMap textures/your_cubemap texgen reflect } |
 |
Yes, that's in the linked thread. But if you want to manipulate the channels independently, you have to make a different alpha mask stage each time, ending up with up to six stages to get the job done: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/17308-epis-many-questions-thread/page/5/&tab=comments#comment-388559 |
|
|
I took a glance at that thread, but I'm not getting what's a practical reason / common situation when you'll actually need tinting a cubemap. For reflection you either get specular for tinting and then you use a cubemap "to take reflections to the next stage", if just a specular hotspot on a smooth surface isn't enough. But you don't have to tint cubemaps for that. |
|
|
We have glass materials that accept colour parms for their cubemap stages without having any specular interactions (no light interactions at all in fact, so the cubemap tint should actually work): textures/darkmod/glass/colored for example. |
|
|
And why would you want to create materials in such a weird way? Always start with diffuse/normal/specular combo, and then, if the specularity isn't enough to get the surface properties you want, you add cubemap reflections as well. Besides, cubemaps get washed out by high intensity light sources, so they should never be used instead of a specular map. |
|
|
It is, of course, always possible that people didn't know what they were doing; and it is always possible that they did, and Chesterton's Fence applies. In the case of highly transparent glass and water materials, I surmise that the cubemap stages may be there to represent surface reflectivity independent of actual light interactions, and to accentuate surface distortions in materials that use HeatHaze. (After all, it's not unusual for TDM environments to be dimly lit and to have only very dark scenes behind glass/water surfaces.) |
|
|
Then I'd assume the former, as the workflow I posted is standard for both typical materials and translucent ones. To accentuate the distortion in the HeatHaze material you use a distortion texture for that program. Cubemap is useful when you need to have more than just a specular hotspot reflectivity, so you can put some generic cubemap there or maybe something like a fake interior reflection. But cubemap reflection doesn't replace basic specularity, and it vanishes when you put a light source nearby it or turn on the PC's lantern. |
|
|
I think the direction of this thread has ceased to be germane to the tracker. |
|
|
...As the whole ticket itself, which is based on low-priority corner case, which is in turn a result of an incorrect way of working with materials. I don't see dozens of developers complaining about not having something to do here, so tickets like this one aren't helping much. |
- Anonymous
