I’m building a library of 3D icons for a game. I’m putting each icon object in it’s own layer so that the camera/perspective will match for each icon. But each icon demands different lighting to look it’s best, so I’m adding lights to each layer. So, one camera, each object is on it’s own layer and has it’s own lighting setup with 1 to 4 lights depending. Simple.
It was working fine for the first 4 icons, the first four layers. But then I started getting artifacts. On my fifth layer, I lost specular highlights in my ‘user’ viewport. Then on my sixth layer, I lost specular highlights on my Camera viewport. Then earlier layers started developing problems. Now none of my layers have both specular and diffuse lighting. Most are missing the specular and one is missing the diffuse, but has the specular. New layers have no lighting at all, regardless of lights present. If I delete all the lights in the layer, I get the phantom base light (which I can’t find in the explorer), but it is rendering inverted-ly; ie, it draws the light from the bottom right instead of the top left (for example), so the upper side of my object is always blacked out.
It would be easy to think that I’ve got lights on the wrong layers, an invisible one. But all the renders are fine, and I can see the correct light icons when the correct layer is visible. And that wouldn’t explain certain viewports ignoring certain lighting elements (specular only) It is only a problem in the viewports. Of course, it’s tricky to model in pitch black…
XSI seems full of bugs like this… the more complex my scene gets, the more issues build up. Perhaps I’m hitting some setting hotkey by mistake. Layers seem particularly buggy. Occasionally, the checkboxes get confused and start doing the opposite of what they say. Unfortunately, while that problem simply requires a restart of XSI, this lighting issue is persistent. Any ideas what would cause this, or how to reset the viewports?
[EDIT]
Trying to find a work around, I ‘move selected objects to Layer’ a mesh from my new pitch black layer to an older diffuse-lit layer. As soon as the mesh moved over, the diffuse-lit layer lost it’s lighting. I growled and opened a new scene without saving, then opened the file again. Without saving, it somehow remembers what happened and now the layer I had moved to remains dark. In fact, it’s neighboring layer, the one with specular only, has gone pitch black as well. Some of my layers were unaffected…
