Lighthouses in SH5

[Seaowl]

Pity one cannot use the searchlight glares in combination with the lighthouse

Kendras experimented with searchlights as lighthouse flares in SH3. You can find his posts referring to this here:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...228731&page=30

By now I have solved the smoothing problem:
In fact, it was no issue with edges or faces, but trouble with uv-map and consequential
trouble with texture.
For whatever reason, parts of the uvs were stretched across the border of the uv-map.

I was able to repair this, without creating a new uv-map:



Furthermore the GR2 lighthouse has a working GR2 lense:

Because of the structure of the GR2 file, it was necessary to create a Normal- and AOmap for the lense.
Seems a bit overdone, but otherwise the lense stayed black (it wasn´t possible to disable Normal- and AOmap inside the GR2 file.)
Besides I made use of the Normal-map to texture some rudimentary Fresnel structure.

At the moment I use two particle-controllers at the same time inside the simfile of the lense: The particle controller, that comes with Flakmonkeys lighthouse and the particle controller of TDW, I found inside the TWOS library,
That makes the flare more intense.

But on the other hand using TDW controller alone has one big advantage: the lighthouse flare doesn´t shine through nearly everything like bunker walls, houses, ships, hills...
Hopefully I will find the cause for that, so I could apply it on the other particle controller as well.

Here another picture from further away: (on the left the GR2 lighthouse, on the right the Dat lighthouse)



Here some early version of the Normal-map: as base I used a very detailed brick texture.
But in the end I had the impression, that it was a bit too much:




One thing bothers me now: no matter which particle controller is used, it seems that the GR2 lense needs some kind of activation.
It starts to glare not until then the free camera comes close.

Once activated though the flare stays visible from far away