Blown out highlights on Paint Effects in moderately bright lighting
Q: My real problem comes in when I raise the value of one directional light to a measly "2"...the paint effects are completely blown out and there does not seem to be a global light sensitivity for the paint effects...are they simply hard coded to work in the 0-1 range?
A: When brushes aren't textured the specular seems to increase as the square of the brightness( a bug ). The command scaleBrushBrightness( Maya3.0 or later ) adjusts the brightness of either all picked brushes or the current default brush. It also accounts for the specular problem. It turns out that quite a few parameters must be adjusted currently ( an added brightness parameter on brushes would be a good idea! ).
Here are some examples of the usage of this command.
scaleBrushBrightness 0.5 0
This will dim your brushes by 50%.
To modify the current default or template brush type:
scaleBrushBrightness 0.5 1
( the second parameter is a toggle to affect the default brush) To restore the brush to what it was before the last scale, scale by the inverse (i.e. 1/scale ) that you used, in this case:
scaleBrushBrightness 2.0 1