Godot: Directional light for inherited scene preview

[DevMagicLord]

When you create a new inherited scene that is some model prefab it won't have a light as child object

1 ) It's hard to figure how it looks and adjust material parameters.
2) the thumbnail when you save the inherited scene won't have lighting for better preview and thumbnail

When making an inherited scene , it needs to have a directional light option that will not save into the scene file, but it's only purpose is better preview material and get a thumbnail with lighting.

Left is inherited scene, right is the same scene with light preview
https://github.com/DevMagicLord/Godot3/blob/master/bugs/download/lightpreviewnew.jpg?raw=true

[Zylann]

Isn't it just the fact that a scene has no light by default unless you actually put a Light node? (it used to be the case regardless of inheritance). I'm curious how this light preview works, is it a new feature?

[mrcdk]

You can already add any light node and set it to editor only. Wouldn't that be enough?

[capnm]

Looks like the editor only property doesn't work in the current git master, could somebody verify that?

[DevMagicLord]

In Unity when you make a prefab, it has a thumbnail with some sort of lighting or environment ligthing.
It's not a dark color Tumbnail.

Why Godot could not lighten up thumbnails.
It's only a improvment proposal to make thumbnails better in Godot.
(I don't care if it's not improved)

[bojidar-bg]

I think some method of setting a default editor-only directional light (maybe in the editor, maybe per-project) and using it in all scenes without a proper light might be quite useful.

Currently editor-only Light nodes are still present in the scene tree in debug, and, AFAIK, in release build exports as well.

[akien-mga]

Currently editor-only Light nodes are still present in the scene tree in debug, and, AFAIK, in release build exports as well.

@bojidar-bg That's about to be fixed: #23256.

[DevMagicLord]

Great.

[bojidar-bg]

@akien-mga I mean, they are present in the scene tree even if not registered on the VisualServer. So, you can still get an editor-only light via get_node or get_children.

[Calinou]

@reduz suggested on IRC that we can have a default DirectionalLight as part of the Environment resource. It'll be visible both in the editor and running project, but it'll disappear as soon as a DirectionalLight node is added to the scene. This way, we can get good lighting out of the box while keeping predictable behavior between the editor and running project.