Wierd kerbal lighting

[purpleivan]

I've been playing around with some texture alterations today, as some preparation for a story series I'm planning to work on and I found something odd about the lighting of the kerbal characters.

The issue is that the gloves don't appear to be lit correctly, as if ther normals in that part of the mesh are incorrect.

Here's an image to show what I mean, which has a character with a pure white colour texure, all detail coming from the normal map.

If you look at the character's left hand, which is facing the sun, it appears darker on the sun side (back) than the shadowed side (the palm). in fact it has the same colour value as the shadowed side of the right arm, which recieves no direct light.

Most likely it's been there for a long time and I've just got used to it and mentally filtered it out. It was only because I was tinking with the textures that it caught my eye.

My first reaction was that I'd screwed up something in making my changes, but I confirmed this wasn't the case, by first removing all the none stock textures. This gave the same result (dark back of the hands), so not an error I'd introduced.

I then checked this on different planets (didn't make any sense, but did it just in case) and found the result was the same, the hands were lit wrong.

I also had a look at this in v1.2 and the results was again the same, dark back of the hands. I even dug out the oldest build I have around (1.0.4) and still the hands were wrong.

After playing the game for so long and doing a lot of art work based on screenshots, I'm a bit shocked that I've not noticed this before.

 

Edited March 3, 2018 by purpleivan

[qzgy]

Looks like there is a lightsource in the feet. Really not even that..... But yeah didn't see this before either...

Edited March 4, 2018 by qzgy

[purpleivan]

Ok... I've done some more detailed testing of the lighting, with a surprising result.

Plucky scientist Katdorf Kerman put on the white suit and helped out with this.

First I put her on a rig with red, green and blue lighting from different directions, to see what's happening with the normals (ignore the colouring on the light objects, they're recieving the light from to opposite lamp).

This looks fine, so I was a little confused, as I expected to see inconsistent lighting on the hands.

So brave Katdorf left for Laythe via the power of Hyperedit, to join the band of colonists there. I lined her up next to Jeb, he's on the left, she's on the right

So this new wanderer from kerbin has correct lighting, but old Jeb doesn't... wierd.

How about I set up two exisiting colonists as well, 1 male and 1 female, in the same white suit texture (dudes on the left of the picture).

Hmmm.. so it seems that the male suit model has problems with its normals but the female one doesn't.

Now for one final head to head test... male vs female under the coloured lighting rig, with Katdorf (left) and her colleague Franklin (right).

If you look at the female model on the left, the lighting colour is consistent, with light from right of the screen being green, the left red and top blue. However the male model looks a bit of a mess in the hand area. In fact the arms as a whole have issues, but they're more noticeable on the hands.

Now that I've got these results I'll submit a bug report.