Exterior night lighting

These are placement tests for the Apache model in the editor, getting a feel for colour, levels, position, range and angle. The left nav light (red) on the Apache model needs to have the fullbright material applied to be visible in dark conditions.  One pilot was telling me that the ground on the left side on the helicopter appears brighter than the right with night vision. Interestingly our night vision shader amplifies lighting levels based on final pixel colour and gives a boost to red values so you should also experience the same effect.

Same again but with the nav strobe blinking, ever so short flash that should be visible 2km away in game terms. It uses a corona and not a real light source for performance reasons. It's highly visible and does it's job. Although it will probably flare-out or clip in NV mode. I experimented adding two point lights in the cockpit area, these lights currently exist in the internal cockpit mode but I'll see about adding them to the external model if it can be easily done. On the whole, performance would be better just baking that light onto the texture but the exterior cockpit is really simple, the canopy doesn't cast shadows and the light range is short.

Final shot is the retractable spot-light, which we were going to model, maybe we did already but can't remember...(check notes). It's supposed to be steerable and there's a toggle switch for it somewhere. I think  using a 3D cone mesh to add a bit of fake 'haze' around it might be an idea.

I shall get these coded up into the game model now. Pretty pleased with the overall layout.