Lightning Of Ns Maps
Abra
Would you kindly Join Date: 2003-08-17 Member: 19870Members
Would you kindly Join Date: 2003-08-17 Member: 19870Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Tutorials? Help?</div> <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'><span style='font-family:Arial'><b>Hello Fellow Mappers!</b></span></span>
I think this forum lacks some threads on how to create good and dark lightning of a map.
If some of you pro mappers out there could give their advise on how to create those, NS stylish light, and darkness, it would be good - very good.
When a mapper creates a room, a good one. Everything will be crap if it dont got the right lighting, and the right dark, spotlight, and source for the light .
So if everyone would give an advise on how to create those legendary lighted maps, the mapping community would grow better.
By the way, a skulk sometimes visit my garden... uh uh <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->
I think this forum lacks some threads on how to create good and dark lightning of a map.
If some of you pro mappers out there could give their advise on how to create those, NS stylish light, and darkness, it would be good - very good.
When a mapper creates a room, a good one. Everything will be crap if it dont got the right lighting, and the right dark, spotlight, and source for the light .
So if everyone would give an advise on how to create those legendary lighted maps, the mapping community would grow better.
By the way, a skulk sometimes visit my garden... uh uh <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->
Comments
::::::::::Rad Settings::::::::::::
Light values: These vary a LOT with the compile settings. A setting like dscale 6, bounce 2, gamma 0.5 will generally do well with 600-1500 as the light setting. This amount seems to me to be on a per pixel basis, so larger faces will generate more light than smaller ones. Since people seem to use small lights a lot around here you generally see very high (4-5 thousand) light values.
dscale: higher settings of this will give you a very high contrast between light and shadow. I've seen a lot of 5 and 6 settings to it.
fade: Seen this one tweaked also, but not often. It can let you make pools of bright light that are quickly surrounded by darkness. Problem is it applies to your whole map and makes you put in a lot more lights to consistently light up an area.
bounce: Usually one or two here. A higher bounce setting will make light from one inidividual light bounce around the room more times. This gives you a more even color appearance. Normally this is desired, but with NS lighting it seems people favor lower bounce numbers and more contained colored lights. Usually see 1, 2, or 3 as a setting.
Direct light: This is something I don't really know what other people do with. It can help to cap out the brightness of a map without the "artificial" feel of the maxlight setting. Like I said I don't know of this being used much, but it could help.
Maxlight: This settings clips the amount of light applied to a face at the value of the setting. So a maxlight of 256 will make it so that no face has a light value higher than 256. Potentially this can be used on a high setting to tone lights down from being fullbright to something slightly less than that without affecting the actual look of your map.
Gamma: I see this one in a range from somewhere around 0.5 to 2.0. Usually it is adjusted to suit your other compile settings. This is the compiler setting, not the env_gamma map entity setting (more on that later)
Extra: There's no reason to not do a final compile without extra on, it makes the lighting look better and final compiles should never be fudged to run faster.
Sparse: Useful if you have very small amounts of memory in your system (I think less than 256, might need correcting there though) the original settings are faster than this, but take up around ten times as much memory. I say run your map with sparse set to on and monitor the process in task manager. If HLRAD doesn't seem to use more than 10% of your currently available memory go ahead and turn it off for faster compiles. (note available memory is the one listed as available in task manager, it's different from system memory since it accounts for the amount of ram windows needs)
HLVIS
Fast: good for testing, bad for final compiles. Only use it to look at your brushwork with incomplete lighting.
Full: turn this on for final compiles. Makes things better at the cost of compile time.
::::::::::Design Considerations::::::::::
Lots of small lights: This is the number one cause of NS maps looking like ns maps. You don't see many lights running the length of the room in ns. by lighting your map with many small lights you can easily adjust them to create light/shadow areas AND have more ambient lighting overal.
Definitley small colored lights: With the exception of ns_nothing's red room, and probably some other areas I can't remember light now, no maps use colored lighting for the main room lights. You often see highlighting with colors, sometimes you will see a lot of color used in a room, but you can almost always find a lot of white light in any room. (or yellow light used in the same manner) By using colored lights to highlight doors/stairs/other important things you can both help people find the stuff AND make some spiffy lighting for your map.
Spotlights: Here's another popular lighting solution. Spotlights (as implemented through a light_spot entity) are generally used to highlight an area. Be it the platform used to cross between two areas, a command chair, resource nozzle, or weld point, or maybe just an area that you feel people would want more light (stairs for instance) spotlights add ambience to your map by making pools of light that give the non-spotlit parts of the room a feel that they are even darker than normal.
env_gamma: This is the in-game gamma setting. I usually use around 1.0 for it, but results vary. It is different from the compile setting. (compile setting is what is used at light generations, env_gamma is applied across the map when it is loaded in half life) Make sure to set this to something, otherwise the previous map's gamma setting is used and your lighting will probably not look right.
That's all I have
this is a pic of my map ns_alcatraz when it was at its first state: (<b>before prober lightning</b>)
It ain't a tut, but more of an article.
But how does you guys MAKE the light. I mean i know how to place a light_spot and such, but where do you place it? and what values do you give it?
also could anyone give an example of a map they are building, show it how they do - and then show the picture(s) on how it looks?
Oh and i'll put some example maps in there as well so you can look at the rmf and see what and how i'm doing it.