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[Mick]

... this is for sure a very useful find Istvan, as it is especialy irritating to watch vehicules disappear for no obvious reason ...!!

I'll give a look at all my Wflyer mat files and correct them by replacing their value with 4 ...

THX for sharing mate ... 

[vpmedia]

Mick, we did not know the reason for the disappearing meshes with Wflyer stuff yet

Imho correcting Specular Pow 32 to 4 wont fix that, only the wrong 3d lighting

[Mick]

... ah, OK, I must have misunderstood then, thanks for telling me, but I'll however take a look at the mat files ... 

[vpmedia]

you can place the object in fmb change the values select a different object then go back to the first and see the changes so you dont have to restart the game

[vpmedia]

You were right Boomer, none of the ToW objects had proper 3d lighting.
These 150 objets use more almost a thousand mat files so correcting them is a huge task in itself.
Do you need the files if I finished them?

Yes please,
if you could post a link to the corrected tanks files I would download it 

This cool utility enables you to instantly find and replace words and phrases across multiple files and folders>
http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/textcrawler/tcdownload

It seems,you've opened up a regular pandora's box with all these objects 
ToW,Vehicle,these and those objects...

Really great find though,
it is nice even to just know now what is wrong with all these objects 

I'm using Total Commander which is able to find strings in files without the need to opening them, plus it can list all the files in a listbox from where I can drag all at once into Ultra Edit where I do the batch find/replace thing. Here's the link to the corrected ToW objects: http://www.vpmedia.eu/il2/zip/TEXTURES_Buildings3_UP3.zip

After testing I've found these values to give the best look for the Tow objects:

[LightParams]
  Ambient 1.0
  Diffuse 1.0
  Specular 0.2
  SpecularPow  1
  Shine 0.0

[vpmedia]

I'm glad youre interested in this...theres going to be a larger pack (one zip file to download) later with all my mods in different subfolders including lots of fixes for buildings.

[Mick]

THX in advance Istvan ... 

I took a look at Wflyer's tank packs and found there are a lot of .TGAs that are not in indexed colours, some of them even being as big as 4Mb  ...  ???

So I indexed them all, but I now have a few glitches (mainly in the sides of a few tanks) since some of the TGAs shouldn't be indexed, I suppose because they have alpha layers or something like that ...  ???

So this morning I am going to use my back up (old guys always back up first ...  ) to fix that ... 

I also corrected all the SpecularPow 16 or 32 that I found and there were a lot ...

[vpmedia]

THX in advance Istvan ... 

I took a look at Wflyer's tank packs and found there are a lot of .TGAs that are not in indexed colours, some of them even being as big as 4Mb  ...  ???

So I indexed them all, but I now have a few glitches (mainly in the sides of a few tanks) since some of the TGAs shouldn't be indexed, I suppose because they have alpha layers or something like that ...  ???

So this morning I am going to use my back up (old guys always back up first ...  ) to fix that ... 

I also corrected all the SpecularPow 16 or 32 that I found and there were a lot ...

I did that 4Mb-1Mb conversion for the artillery by resizing image, in hope to stop dissappearing meshes.
I'm not sure about using indexed color images as texture...this issue needs to be tested somehow or even ask TD about the standards. I'm pretty sure that converting a file with alpha channel to 256 color will delete the channel and the result is not nice.

Other thing:  if Specular is 0.0 then SpecularPow has no effect.

[vpmedia]

Well, thanks for the interest. I categorize these as minor proplems since they got no effect on gameplay but its good to fix them anyway. I started with the ToW stuff because those looked flat without Specular lights.
For the indexed color procedure I hope that you've used Photoshop

[wolfiz]

I'll bump a 3 year old thread with some of my own experiments in object lighting and popup distance, particularly buildings

[WxTech]

'Specular' controls the degree of shininess of a surface.

'SpecularPow' controls the smoothness of the surface, and thus the degree of concentration of the specular light. Increasing this makes the surface more mirror-like, with a narrower range of angle over which the specular light is seen. I commonly use 16, or even 32, for metallic surfaces like storage/fuel tanks.

[vpmedia]

This whole topic is about people using wrong values like 16 or 32.

Specular pow is a multiplier, it increases the amount of white in each pixel by x so with a 32 value you will get 100% white for most colors which is not realistic. Stock is specular 0.4 and specular pow 4, some of the modded 3d models require less. In some cases the devs turned specular reflection (thats what its called) off because of errors in object lighting, in many cases they probably forgot about it. Every object requires some level of specular reflection, without it they look flat. For a plane 0.4/4 is fine, for a house/ship/tank the optimal value is between 0.1 and 0.2 imho. I also had to extract most modded cockpits to correct these errors. Its very easy to do with a text editor like UltraEdit.

I already corrected many errors with these mods:
planes of UP3/DBW: https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,20788.0.html
stock and modded ships: https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,24382.0.html