Saturated models

[ogg]

Hi, I've always (at least as far as I can remember) had a problem that 3ds models are over-saturated when not textured. Here's an example screenshot of the new columbia model:



as you can see, the white is really white and the black nosecone and wing tiles are also, well, rather white. The same thing occurs for the Galileo model and others, for any surface of the model that is not textured and is illuminated by the sun (ie the 'ambiantly' lit side looks about as dark as expected. There might also be something screwy with the colours displayed; the Galileo model looks like it is coloured differently in Celestia then it is in Anim8or, for example, but with one side too bright and the other very dark it's hard to tell! I'll paste my OpenGL info, does anyone know of a fix or workaround with this?

OpenGL info:

Vendor: Trident
Renderer: Blade XP/AGP
Version: 1.2.1
Max simultaneous textures: 2
Max texture size: 1024

Supported Extensions:
GL_ARB_multitexture
GL_EXT_abgr
GL_EXT_bgra
GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array
GL_EXT_packed_pixels
GL_EXT_paletted_texture
GL_EXT_vertex_array
GL_WIN_swap_hint

[chris]

The list of supported extensions is missing GL_EXT_rescale_normal, which is required by Celestia for proper lighting of 3DS models. I may be able to code a workaround, as I have for spherical planets.

I'd recommend getting a different graphics card; if that's not an option, you should see if an updated driver is available from Trident. The software support provided by some graphics card vendors is very disappointing--GL_EXT_rescale_normal is a very basic piece of OpenGL functionality.

--Chris

[ogg]

Thanks for the reply Chris, I was hoping it wasn't the card. Upgrading really isn't an option at the moment 'cos it's laptop, and I think they just really don't care about making their graphics cards work as well as they might have. It's just annoying that the built-in adapter has enough memory for medium-size (4kish) textures with fast framerate but can't do the simple stuff like shade models properly. sigh.