Define your own light models

Overview

Improving graphics performance by defining your own light models

Description

By default, Creo Elements/Direct Modeling uses eight lights in each viewport to illuminate your models. On many graphics configurations, reducing the number of lights will result in better interactive graphics performance. As an example, we have seen performance improvements by over 40% on some PC graphics boards when using only two lights.

In the personality directory of your installation, you will find three files which contain light model definitions for two, three and four lights:

• two_lights.lsp
• three_lights.lsp
• four_lights.lsp

Activation

To use two lights by default in your viewports, proceed as follows:

1. Copy two_lights.lsp into your personal customization directory or into a Site or Corp customization directory under the name "sd_lights.lsp".
2. Restart Creo Elements/Direct Modeling.

Once configured like this, whenever Creo Elements/Direct Modeling opens a new viewport, these special light settings will be used.

Two lights will give you the best performance, and eight lights will produce the best image quality. Four lights are a very reasonable compromise between the two - image quality is very good, and we have seen performance improvements by 25% by using four rather than eight lights on some configurations.