Construct Animate r498

Notes

This week we're launching a major new feature, and the most significant visual update for a long time: 3D lighting! Take any existing project, drop in the new 3D light object, and you'll instantly see a realistic 3D lighting effect. You can adjust the light color and intensity, using a reference distance as the distance at which the light has 100% brightness to help get suitable lighting. You can use a point light, directional (lights all surfaces evenly regardless of distance), or a spot light (lights a cone shaped area); the light can also be rotated in 3D to orient directional and spot lights. Currently the engine supports up to 16 lights on-screen at once, but to help manage this, lights that do not visibly contribute to the viewport are automatically excluded, based on the light radius.

Once you add a light to a layout, some new material properties will appear for objects in the layout. These include the surface type (allowing a "flat" mode for a retro style appearance, or disabling 3D lighting on a per-object basis), a specular color and amount, and a shininess factor, which are all used to calculate the 3D lighting appearance of that object. A new ambient light property will also appear for the layout, allowing you to control the minimum light level.

As we have a unified hybrid 2D and 3D engine, lighting applies consistently to both 2D objects like Sprite (including with 3D rotation, and even 3D mesh distortion) and 3D objects like 3D model and 3D shape. Lights do not yet cast shadows - that's something we'll be looking to in future - but you can still produce some impressive effects with them. We can't wait to see what you come up with!