This is fun, now back to work(formeanyway)

[donnato]

Well it`s been quite a vacation. I managed to learn a bit there. Wha I want to donow is add stained glass to my ranch house. Mainly there`s only one window I want to change, and I can do the retex on the exterior. What I want to learn about is inside the house. I read through the "tex 101" tut about glow maps, but I didn`t get that this was the same. The "transmitted" light Should show not only the coloring, but also respond to time of day lighting outside. At night, from outside, one should see the glow of interior lighting affected by the colored bits also. I know this will by no means be easy, and very probably, very complicated. Any pointers will be greatly appreciated. Thanks all.

[donnato]

I've been fiddling about with something similar and have a partial but not especially convincing solution: my windows are translucent panes with a hemispherical backdrop behind them on which I've stuck a static image that hopefully looks not too unconvincing. I forget the setting I use for this, but it emits that sort of non-illuminating light you can get from NIFs.

My partial solution to the "time of day" thing is to plant a daylight-coloured light source between the panes and the backdrop, with a radius of about 200 or so units, and optionally a diagonally-placed light beam just to give a bit more of the right effect. At present, to differentiate between night and day I use a script on one of the light sources telling it to deactivate itself if the time is before or after my morning and evening cut-off points, and I parent it to the other light sources and light beams in the vicinity so they get the same treatment. It's a bit abrupt, though it may not be so bad if I stop it doing its thing while the player's wandering about their current vicinity.

What I'd like to do is to vary the output of the light source, but unless I'm prepared to put up with the confusion of, say, half a dozen light sources in the same spot and have one enabled at any given time, I'm not sure it's do-able. Maybe OBSE has a function for fiddling with light intensity and colour: maybe I should look.

I'd also like a way of making the backdrop a bit less bright at night, but have yet to figure out how to do that also. I'd hoped to put a midnight-blue coloured translucent sheet behind the glass panes, but I've had problems with two layers of transparency where one of them vanishes if I look at them from particular angles. There's probably a solution, but it's one of those "a hundred ways to do the same thing, 99 of which don't work properly"!

If I get it working more nicely I'll post my findings here, but at present I don't want to get too bogged down, so I guess I view what I have now with an "it'll do" attitude.

Thanks cbh. I`ve been studying blender lately and I know there`s lighting gradient available there. I imagine the gradient can be animated to make it progressive. The only thing I can think (with my so-far limited learning ) is that this "package" would then have to be imported as a "scripted" lighting package, filed so as to allow Oblivion to read it and implement its instructions...or not.

[donnato]

Well if you get it working, let me know how you did it! I've found with Blender and modelling in question that there's far too many things you need to know, far too many of which I know far too little about. You get the idea, anyway... I'm always amazed at some of the things people come out with in Blender, I just find myself going "argh!" every time I try to use it.

Oh you got that right about the boggling array of manipulations. I`m just learning and will be for quite some time, I`m sure. I have figured that going this route will be increadibly complex...or increadibly simple. either way it`ll probably take me awhile to grasp the convolutions necessary, especially the simple ones. I seem to miss those most often. Whatever I do for the interior, I`ll also have to do for the ext. also. Right now I`m messing with transparent meshes and multiple lighting with each one colored differently, One more red, one green, one blue, etc. The camera also comes into it but I haven`t even messed with that. My time is so limited.

edit: Okaay...way beyond me at this stage. Nevermind.