Layout Lighter

    The RealiTools Lighter plug-in is an extremely powerful lighting plug-in.  RealiTools_Lighter can be found on the Surfaces panel, as a Shader Plug-in.  While LightWave's shading model is extremely good, it's always the same.  That gives it a distinctive "look" that experienced animators can look at and say "Oh yeah, that's a LightWave image!".  Using Lighter, you can change how light hitting a surface behaves, and help eliminate that problem.
    There are a myriad of controls for Lighter, and at first it may be a bit overwhelming.  But, a great number of them have the same function, just in a different context.  First, lets discuss how Lighter treats lights.  There are two custom setups that you can define, and a DEFAULT setting.  By using "tags", you can say that any light whose name contains that text will behave a certain way.  You can have two different "tagged" setups.  If a light doesn't qualify for either of those, it will use the DEFAULT setup.
    So, Light 1 Tag is the tag for the first custom setup.  The next control, Phase, lets you change how the light hits the surface.  Put simply, it lets you move the terminator (where the surface goes from light to dark) closer to, or farther from, the light.  This is in degrees.  Making it higher will move the terminator closer to the light, and making it lower will move the terminator away.  Note that if you set this to 180 degrees, the light will actually appear on the opposite side of the surface!  I really can't think of a practical use for this yet, but it's there if you need it.  Next is Contrast.  This lets you make the terminator on the surface sharper or softer.  It's like a flexible version of the LightWave "Sharp Terminator" option.
    Transmittance lets you have light show through a surface.  Often, light on the opposite side of a surface (paper, leaves, etc.) will illuminate the surface.  By changing this, you can set what percentage of the light will make it through.  Following it is Scale.  The plug-in will respond appropriately to LightWave's Diffuse and Luminosity settings, but using this will make tagged lights have more or less of an effect.  To make the tagged lights have only half their normal effect, turn Scale down to 50%, and to make them have twice the effect, turn it up to 200%, etc.  The Specular control is just like LightWave's, but you can turn it up higher.  Likewise, Glossiness is also the same.  Valid glossiness settings go from 16 to 1024.
    The Custom Specular Color is also pretty self-explanatory.  Normally, the specular color will come from the light hitting the surface, but by turning on the Use Custom Specular Color option below, you can make the specular color whatever you choose.  Prevent over-brightness lets you cap off the surface.  If you turn up the contrast, you may find the surface gets a bit too bright.  Turning this on will help.  Finally, the Exclude control lets you have the plug-in ignore any lights containing this tag in their name.
    Okay, so now you know how the tags work.  The only difference between the DEFAULT tag and the other two is that you cannot selectively include lights on it.  You can, however, use light exclusion on the DEFAULT setup.  After that, there are only a few controls left - Custom Ambient Color lets you choose...yes...a custom ambient color!  Ambient Intensity works just like LightWave's Ambient Intensity option.  Next is the Use Custom Ambient Color, which must be activated if you want to use the ambient color you set above.  Finally, the two buttons Load and Save...well, they load and save.  In many situations, you'll want to use the same Lighter settings on several surfaces, but you'll want the surfaces to have different properties.  To save time, you can save the settings of one Lighter file and load them on another surface.  Files are (by default) saved with a ".ltr" extension.

Preview Controls

Preview Diffuse:Diffuse value of the sample sphere. Same as in the surfaces panel.
Preview SpecularSpecular value of the sample sphere.
Preview ColorColor of sample sphere.
Checkers:Use a checker background in the preview window<.