How do I set a light to only cast spec?

[Tangled-Universe]

Thanks for showing those Greg. It looks as though you might have some luck by increasing the index of refraction and/or reflectivity on your surfaces. The highlight on the sun side would also get brighter of course, but I don't think that would be a bad thing. Perhaps in other images it wouldn't work so well. Maybe a different lighting angle will bring out the specular more; maybe this will become more apparent once it's animated. I will look into adding more controls after 2.0 "final" release.

Much more than any other feature I really would like/must have the ability to parent objects and lights to each other -- in this case I want to fly ships with pointlights in the engines, and with even a couple of ships it is impractical to individually animate each attachment.  If you have any suggestions on how I can hack that up (or induce you to add that soon) I'm eager for it.

A general solution for all objects is probably not possible for 2.0 final, but light sources would be much simpler. I have been looking into allowing light sources to be parented to other objects, nulls or light sources in a way that could be extended to all objects later on (which will require a lot more planning and testing). It really depends on how fast we get everything else done first.

Matt

Oh wow, that sounds really good Matt Those would be some nice features!

[Matt]

Good, thanks, Matt.  I don't even require any planning and testing:  any way to make a null object follow a path, with a bunch of tie fighters attached at 0 0 0 that I can then individually raise and lower, move side to side, and alter pitch yaw and roll to give individuality to the squadron...

Actually I meant planning and testing on our part. Implementing a robust parenting system for geometry when the various components of the renderer and the interface aren't already designed to do this certainly requires a lot of planning and testing. Light sources are a simpler case where less can go wrong.

Matt

[gregsandor]

That's what I meant, sort of tongue-in-cheek.  It doesn't have to be fancy; I want to be able to move a parent object to 0 0 0 and tell a bunch of other objects to each be x meters away from it, at whatever orientation.  Then when I move it to 55 100 0 or whereever, they also move and I can animate their distance and orientation in relation to the parent object rather than the world.  A simple text input in the UI by default can show "World" as parent, and can be changed to the name of the new parent object.  I can send you an example of what I mean.

[Matt]

I think I understand. It would be slightly simpler to implement when there's only translation of the parent to consider, but I can't really implement half-complete solutions to things at this stage unfortunately. If I get a chance to implement lightsource parenting and during the course of that it turns out that everything appears to be fairly straightfoward, I may be able to do it for all objects. There are a lot of ifs in that though

Matt