Specular highlights

D'oh. It's only just occured to me today that you can get a great specular highlight effect, using a dynamic, spherical environment map.

I guess that's the way everyone else has been doing it for years, right?

Yup.

You can light your model that way too.

I've never figured out how to create a dynamic spherical environment map in Blitz3D. I could increase the focal width of a small enviroment-cam, but it wouldn't make a sphere map.

I've pretty much kept a wide birth of sphere maps as a result as I don't really know what to do with them, i'll keep an eye on this thread :).

A spherical environment map in blitz is simply a texture mapped to the inside of a sphere. The centre of that texture is always at the point of view of the camera so you have to manually position the hightlight spot on the texture, in relation to where the light and camera are. You get this:



Viewed from behind (the dark side), the skeleton isn't highlighted. Well, I though it was kinda cool, but I'm easily pleased. Beats EntityShininess! :P

P.S. Model is from Birdies's folder in the examples. Not sure why all the limbs are dis-jointed, but it shows the effect.

Nice effect :o)