Why the 4 light limit? [EDIT: Limit has been increased!]

[GameMonetize]

@dal: babylon.js turns light off according to inverse creation order  

 

just create the sun first and you're good!

[JCPalmer]

@Deltakosh, what is the lowest value, 1 or 0?

Checked materialHelper, seems to be 0.  Possibly useful for materials that emit and do not require lights.

[GameMonetize]

for material with no light you can set materia.disableLighting = true

[tg121268]

I am playing with babylon-js to render a 3D perspective of 1000 of our nearest solar neighbours at:

www.inthesky.xyz

At the moment, the stars look like billiard balls, centred in each sphere there is a point light x 1000 [ 1000 stars]

 var light = new BABYLON.PointLight("Omni", new BABYLON.Vector3(x, y, z), scene);

Is there a way to make the sphere's material transparent to make the billiard balls look more like stars?

[GameMonetize]

Hello your site does not work for me but you can use material.alpha = 0.5 for instance to control opacity on your spheres

[Wingnut]

(Wingy hugs DK for being off-topic cordial) 

Hey tg, I was able to browse your project, and it is COOOL.  I like it.  (and welcome to the forum) 

Um, perhaps you should start a new topic in Questions and Answers...  maybe call it "Ongoing Questions - In The Sky Project"  (or similar)  (if you wish).  I think lots of people would like to hear about it, and help if they could.

[Dal]

@tg121268 Hey, your project looks cool!

As much as I was trying to argue in this thread that we DO need more than 4 lights per object in some scenes, I don't think your example is a good case for that.
Dynamic lights are expensive and you don't need them unless you need to have them cast light on something else that is moving around the scene. Your stars don't really need to light up anything else, they just need to look bright in themselves, and that's a different trick.

For your stars, you can just give them a bright colour and emissive texture to look bright and possibly use a bloom shader: http://www.babylonjs.com/Demos/PPBloom/
You can also use a billboard texture behind the star or a shader effect to make it look like it has an aura, take a look at davrous' cool example of a star:

 

[GameMonetize]

16 lights: http://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#IRVAX#1

24 lights: http://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#IRVAX#2

32 lights: http://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#IRVAX#3

[Wingnut]

Holy crap, @Deltakosh  I didn't see this til now, when @adam pointed it out.  Unbelievable!   How the heck?  Sigh.  Wow!

Friggin' miracle workers!  I bookmarked this 50 times, just to make sure I don't lose it. 

Ya know those fountains in fancy places... water jets lit with colored spots... lined-up to make a wall of colored fountains?  yuh yuh yuh, I think it can be done in webGL now.  Particle materials... hmm.

I think I tried shooting particles through a spotlight frustum once... just to see what would happen.  Apparently I wasn't real successful, as I never produced one of my "ridiculous demos" from that.

You genius guys are removing all the "impossible" from impossible things, ya know? 

Dk, while I have your ear, would you please check/update the playground tutorial URL that is shown with the PG 'new' button?  thx.

[GameMonetize]

ouch!! yeah this is a rather old link

I'll fix it

 

[GameMonetize]

Done!