I noticed that outside portals block light from the atmosphere. If I place the outside portals at the windows this will look not very realistic as there won’t come any light through the windows.
Whats the best place to place outside portals? Whats the influence of the performance if I don`t place any? Does that make any difference? In the editor the effect of light shining through the windows looks nice but after compiling the outside portals block light.
I thnk it’s your glass texture, the problem, I might be wrong…
Show us how did you placed the outside portal brushes
You need an ambient light inside, you will still notice a difference between outside and inside at the portal location if you look closely.
Even if you add the ambient light entity you will loose the sun marks on the floors that you have on first shot.
Yes, that is true, I believe if you use ambient portal instead of outside portal but in this instance I would probably opt for putting the outside portal on the door to the right of your first shot and leave that room ‘outside’, when you have areas like this I’ve started to place the outside portal further inside a building leaving a ‘lobby’ area of sorts that is still outside and using the atmosphere lighting.
I have tended to do that as well nowadays, placing the outside portal ‘where the sun don’t shine’:
The outside portal is just behind the glass (see left window with glass hidden). I think i will place the outside portal at the doors then… but what key does the light_ambient get? I don`t see anything for the light color - just some ambientCubemap key.
Violator, to do that you is forced to use, for the indoor area, the same ambient_light you used on the outdoor area.
If ambient_light differs, you will have a very weird change of light on the floor, walls and ceiling, between indoor and outdoor areas.
Edit:
Pazur, you can use one of the already done ambientCubeMaps. You need to open editambient editor to see the ones avaliable.
You also can do a new one from scrapt to your indoor area. The changes you do reflects on live in the map, so you can do the changes with the map loaded (via “map [my map]” or “devmap [my map]”).
Just note the name of the ambiemtCubeMap and put it as a key/value in the ambient_light entitie.
light_ambients are kind of like atmospheres for indoors, not best way to explain it but yeah, technically its other way around, atmosphere’s are like light ambients but with more bells and whistles attached, atmoshperes use light ambients as part of their setup. Basically you select an ambientcubemap to best represent the area you have made, there is a ton of them already used in stock maps but if you are feeling confident you can try make your own using the editambient tools, http://wiki.splashdamage.com/index.php/Ambient_Light_Editor