Lighting Guidelines

(swelt) #1

I’ve seen various tutorials, but I think what I’d like to hear are some guidelines on lighting a map for effect and performance. To my mind, a MP map should be well enough lit that players can clearly see what’s going on, but keeping framerates as high as possible is also very desirable.

So far the best thing I’ve read has been this from zombie13 about r_showlightcount:
This view mode shows you how many lights are hitting each surface indicated by different colours: black = 0 lights, red = 1 light, green = 2 lights, blue = 3 lights,anything brighter is more lights again, having white spots like you have there in your map isnt good, it means there is way to many lights hitting that same surface which brings your fps down quite a lot, if you arranged your lighting so the lighting doesnt overlap so much you would get a nice increase in fps

I imagine there’s got to be a bunch of other things along this line… any good approaches to take, tips, experience?

(rgoer) #2

http://www.quake3world.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/028007-8.html? has some useful (if I do say so myself) lighting info in it.

Light volume overlap is the biggest thing to watch for, but it’s not the only thing. You also have to watch out for multiple light volumes overlapping any given triangle (even if the volumes themselves do not necessarily overlap). Light volume overlap = complicated shadow volume calculation = zero frames per second.

r_showlightcount 1 is your friend at the start of the lighting phase
r_showlightcount 2 can help you tweak lighting if it’s still slow and you’ve cleaned it up as far as r_showlightcount 1 can tell (r_showlightcount 2 shows number of lights plus overdraw… basically, everything that can slow shit down besides entity updates and skeletal deformation of characters/monsters on-screen).

For optimal combination of effect and speed, you generally want to light a given room from a single, strong, directional (as in “off to one side”) source–the “key” light–and then using a weaker “fill” light from another direction. Coloring your “key” and “fill” lights with character… something complementary, or maybe a warm/cool relationship can do wonders for the aesthetics of your lighting. As with Quake III, though, you want to avoid super-saturated colors… desaturated, yet still tinted, tends to look nice.

(swelt) #3

Heh. Why didn’t I think of looking in the “Quake 3 Screenshots of what you are doing” thread!? :stuck_out_tongue: Would it be worth consolidating your comments here? I can copy + paste, or perhaps you’d care to put it into a single chunk (to avoid my mis-translating)?

(rgoer) #4

The most important points from that thread have been touched on already, I think–minimize light volume overlap, 2 where you can get away with it, 3 where you absolutely have to, try not to overlap more than 3 lights ever–but if there is anything from that thread you feel should get mentioned again feel free to quote or whatever.