Adobe Director Basics

ADOBE DIRECTOR BASICS
3D: Controlling appearance
Specular Light
Specular light means light that is reflected from a mirror-like surface. (The Latin word for “mirror” is “specularis”).
Specular highlights are created by interaction between a light and a shader. All lights except ambient lights have a
specular property. This is set to TRUE by default. If you set it to FALSE for a particular light, that light stops being
“shiny”. It will not create any specular highlights on any shiny objects.
Directional lights, point lights, and spot lights all send out rays of light that have a direction. These types of light can
produce both diffuse light and specular light. The color and intensity of the diffuse light for a given surface depends
only on the angle that the surface makes to direction of the light's rays. For specular light, the angle of observation is
also important. Specular light requires more calculations. It simulates the shininess of objects, and so makes them look
more real.
Specular light does not make objects look more three-dimensional. If your 3D movie is running on a slow computer,
you can save processor cycles by:
Setting individual light objects so that they trigger no specular calculations
Setting individual shaders not to react to specular light
Using specular light
To get specular light to work in Shockwave 3D, several conditions need to be met:
At least one light in the scene must have its light.specular property set to TRUE (the specular property of ambient
lights is ignored).
The shader must have a non-zero value for its shader.shininess property.
The shader's shader.specular color must have a non-zero value for all channels (red, green and blue).
The model must be oriented so that the rays of light from the specular light source bounce from at least one of the
model's faces into the camera.
Note: If you use a color such as rgb("#FF00000") instead of rgb("#FF0101") for the shader's specular property, the specular
feature will no longer function. All color channels (red, green and blue) for the shader's specular property must have a
non-zero value.
Shininess
If a shader's shininess property is set to 0 specular highlights do not appear. If you set its shininess value is set to 1, the
shader will show a large highlit area. Increasing the value to a maximum of 100 will in fact decrease the area of the
highlight.
Performance
Calculating the shape and position of specular highlights requires significant computer processing power. If you are
delivering an application for low-end computers, consider limiting your use of specular highlights.
Shaders and appearance modifiers
A shader is a programming object that defines how the surface of a 3D model appearance reacts to virtual lights.
Shaders define the model’s surface colors and reflectivity. You can use just one shader or more than one. Each mesh
in a model resource can have its own shader. For example, a box may have six different shaders, one for each mesh (a
box is actually composed of six plane meshes carefully arranged).
Last updated 8/26/2011
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