Introduction

Rendering effects.

Overexposure and Baked in Highlights

If you're adding the Torque Lighting System into an existing project, you've probably noticed that the existing levels, scenes, and assets look very bright - don't worry that's normal and easy to adjust. The Torque Lighting System creates brighter, more vibrant scenes by doubling Torque's lighting intensity, so restoring the original lighting levels is as simple as cutting the color and ambient values of the sun and the interior light entities in half. From there you can go back and increase the level of individual lights to your liking.

Overexposure makes the lighting detail baked into diffuse textures, such as bump and specular highlights, really shine. Artificial or exaggerated highlights can be added to existing diffuse textures, but be careful not to overdo the effect. Generally try to avoid baking in large bump detail, and make sure that specular highlights face a visible light source when placed in levels, otherwise the effect looks faked.

TLK related info:

TLK also overexposes self-illuminating materials, which can leave them far too bright. There are two ways to fix this, either disable overexposure on self-illuminated materials (talk to your development team regarding this compile-time option), or cut the texture intensity in half (assuming there are only one or two offending textures).

TGEA related info:

Don't bake lighting information into TGEA's diffuse textures - bump mapping will add the lighting information dynamically.