Torley lights the way

I’ve not been bothered that much until now by all this windlight stuff. As a designer, I like having control over my colors and the way people percieve them, but having seen some of the pictures and movies people have made with the windlight client, I decided to have another look and re-evaluate my position on it.

Step 1 for me was to look at the Nicholaz viewer website – always my first port of call whenever a new client or whatever comes out. Nicholaz is one of the few who since the opensource viewer came out have really made the most of the potential, and using his modded version I generally get about double the framerate and none of the crashes I’d experience on the standard viewer. And as luck would have it, he’s coded a mod for windlight. So, success.

Next up, I was never really that keen on the standard settings, and didnt really fancy spending ages messing about with creating my own, i’m new to windlight, so I want a test drive, right? But luckily and thanks to the ever-helpful Torley Linden, I found this page which has 120 presets for sky and water. And super-simple to install! Thanks, Torley! The only problem now is choosing one!

So, newly equipped, I now have a stable, fast client that has a whole bunch of presets for effects ranging from fantastic to frightening! I still dont think its that well suited to building, even with the new settings i’m not terribly content with the way it handles color temperature, and most of the time I really need to see clearly what I’m doing, especially with some of the advanced texture creation/mapping – but certainly for regular recreational use or any sort of film or stills, i’ve got a great new toy to play with 🙂