2-2. Links to Nodes in NIFF
6. Handling of Materials in NIFF (#2)
Materials mainly consist of attributes of shapes or parts such as color, light, or shading type, and links to textures.
In NIFF, a color attribute is selected from vertex colors, triangle colors, primitive colors, or texture colors. However, in order to convert to the graphics data for Nintendo 64, there are some restrictions.
When performing a lighting treatment, color data cannot be used as vertex color. That's because Nintendo 64 cannot use a vertex color when specifying a normal vector. And for a triangle color, we need to mix the color of light for each color with a triangle color when converting it into data for Nintendo 64, or we need to convert once again as a primitive color. Therefore, if we consider performing a lighting treatment and efficiency in editing NIFF data, we suggest when specifying a lighting treatment you should divide each part by the same color, and use a primitive color in materials linked to the part. If done so, by editing the material node, you can change the information on the primitive color which has a link to the material at once, improving the efficiency.