Getting visibility of an object

For the purposes of my game, I would like to get the degree to which an object is shaded. From my understanding, ray tracing is used to designate the intensity of light on a face on an object. It would be ideal if I could get a uv-unwrap of the model that is essentially a normalized height map of the intensity of light at any given time; however, i figure that is quite a task. For now, I was wondering where I should be looking in the JME api if I wanted to get the results from the ray tracing on an object. Right now I am just trying to get the average light intensity on an object. Any suggestions?

there is no such thing.
We don’t use ray tracing for lighting. Ray tracing is very often too slow for real time rendering.
All the lighting is done in a shader, for your purpose you’ll have to do a special shader, that computes lighting as is it was classic rendering but instead of rendering the object itself you unfold it’s texture coordinates to screen space and output them.

Idk if you ever get into shader, but if you didn’t you’re not starting with the simplest task…

@nehon,

Thank you for taking the time to respond, and I am sorry to get back to you so late, I have not been able to work on this aspect of the game for some time. I have however, been reading up on shaders and node shaders in the past week. What I have not been able to find an answer to is how I would “hook-into” the shader to get the output, to that end I have been looking at ShaderNodes; however, I have not seen how I would get the output back out to the main application, is there a way I can? Moreover, if I apply a material to a spatial that was loaded with the asset manager function “loadmodel”, I overwrite the original material. Is there a way I can use the already defined material and just add another material on-top-of / post-process it?