Lumiere: no ambient light?

Hi Britzl,

I have been playing around with Lumiere for a while. And while I do get lights to work with it as expected, as soon as I use any light sources, all the gameobjects that do not have an explicit lightsource anywhere near do not get illuminated/displayed at all - there actually does not seem to be any ambient light?

Your example screenshots (lumiere/lumiere/effects/lights at master · britzl/lumiere · GitHub) do seem to confirm this: e.g. the left part with the blue wall is missing completely in the “After” screenshot. But the documentation and API seem go say otherwise and you do seem to allow for custom settings for ambient light.

Or do I misunderstand the concept?

I would expect to have some kind of (more or less dim) light all over the scene and have specific areas additionally lightened up by their own light sources. Is that not the way the effect works?

Currently, as a workaround, I have a background lightsource with a grayish sprite for the entire screen to provide for “ambient” light - but that feels very wrong. Is it?

Thanks for enligthening me (no pun intended :o)

Best regards,
Lutz

Lumiere was a failed attempt at simplifying the Defold renderscript. There’s some useful stuff in there like being able to programmatically modify the render script (now in a separate repo: GitHub - britzl/easel: Easel is used to switch render script content at run-time). The fullscreen effects with glow, scanlines etc are useful on their own as well as examples of how to do fullscreen effects in Defold.

My idea to add an API on top of the existing render.* API was a failure though as it only complicates things and forces developers to learn yet another API.

The idea was probably to have working ambient light but it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment :-/ I don’t have the time right now to look into this.

I’m not sure how to work Lumiere render pipeline, but in original “simple light” example an ambient light is just a color for clearing light texture buffer. Here it is publicexamples/examples/simple_lights/simple_lights/render/postprocess.render_script at master · britzl/publicexamples · GitHub

or you may use my modification based on original “simple light”:

Button ‘a’ for switch an ambient intensity:
https://dragosha.github.io/slasher-prototype/

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Hi Britzl,

thanks for the information. It is a pitty that Defold does not make lightning a little more intuitive, but thanks for answering so promptly.

Best regards,
Lutz

Hi Dragosha,

thanks for pointing out that very impressive Slasher-prototype. Very nice lightning, indeed. I will dig into it a little deeper :o)

Thanks,
Lutz

This is definitely a job for an extension/plugin/Defold library of some kind. Something like what Lumiere did but better. There’s a lot that could be done with such a system but it may also become a bit opinionated which is why it’s better suited for an extension than something provided out of the box.

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