Nasty little tips

[Lamont]

I would like to start a thread with tips and tricks for realtime stuff. Please provide images :) Maybe this can be a sticky...

..::[Vertex Colouring]::..

Lightwave doesn't support "Vertex per Face" like Maya does. This is great for getting sharp edges on colours (shadows, lights..). So a way to get that would be to detatch that face from the mesh (leaving it in the same space it occupied) and apply the colour.

Also, you can apply multipe colours, that would appear to be multiple colours per vertex.

So in the image below, I detatched the bottom quad to give it a hard edged "shadow".

[Dodgy]

If you're merging, but want certain points to not merge, create a morph, and move those points apart. Then when you do a global merge, those points won't merge...

[Lamont]

One way to get soft shadows is to make an image that has a rounded shadow and rectangular shadow. Give it an alpha and put planes under the object. Take care about your game engine features (sorting, blended alpha's...).

If you make the shadow a 50% grey, you can apply vertex colours to change the appearance.

The following image isn't very good for showing space conservation, but show's what I mean. You can do it with one square shadow image.