DeleD Community Edition

[Paul-Jan]

Just some things we'd like to share

Multi-layered materials. The new material editor allows you to create materials consisting of up to three different layers, with several options for blending those layers. At this moment DeleD doesn't allow you to set separate uv coordinates for every layer. Although you can still use this feature to create pretty goodlooking effects, the true power of multitexturing will become available once we add multi-layer uv-coordinate editing (scaling, moving, rotating, skinning, etc) to DeleD as well. We are working on it!

The material preview. You have undoubtedly seen how the material preview is now a shiny ball on a plane (showing you how the material would look 'in action'). For modeling with simple textures and color materials this works just fine, but for modelling with detailed textures you might wish to turn off the eyecandy. The option screen (ctrl+alt+o) allows you to either turn off the specular highlights (which you will never see in DeleD itself anyway) or revert the image to a simple and flat representation of the material, like you are used to. In the future, we might add some more different preview images, to match your taste.

The lightmapper. As someone rightfully pointed out (hi Vampyre_Dark ), the changes to the lightmapper might also require some explanation. The old DeleD version had a property 'ambient scene color', which was used as the shadow color for the lightmapper, to make sure shadows didn't become pitch black. In the new DeleD version, this behaviour is fixed up and split into two concepts: ambient scene color and shadow opacity. The ambient scene color is something you can have baked into your lightmaps (see Options screen to turn this option on or off), in which case it will affect all surfaces (not only those in shadow). The shadow opacity determines how 'transparent' the shadows are, a higher opacity will create sharper, darker shadows.