Recreating outdoor maps (Lighting)

(greensmith) #1

Manypeople in this forum have remarked on how good looking the outdoor areas of doom3 look.

I personally would like to make my own outdoor scene, But am having problems with lighting.

When i have made the skybox, and added my outdoor area such as walkways, the skybox is in fullbright, i can see that perfectly, however Do i need one Huge light to lightup the whole of my walkways, or is there a way to make the skybox emite enough light to illuminate the whole map?

Also on a similar subject, would this be possible using the map scripts, or are they soley for actions such as lightswitches?

(Zombie13) #2

well I have an outdoor area in my map at the moment, well its not accessible, but you can see it, and I used 2 lights, 1 for sun direction into the map casting shadows, and nother on the terrain to light it up nicely, but you could have small lights everywhere, only problem is then you will have to many lights casting onto 1 mesh which can slow it down (happened to me) so I guess I would go with 1 or 2 large lights to get the shadow effects you want :slight_smile:

Zombie

(Zombie13) #3

I guess you could have multiple seperate meshes then the multi lighting wont be an issue, I suppose there is quite a few ways to tackle it, depends what you want :slight_smile:

Zombie

(rgoer) #4

One thing to keep in mind with outdoor areas is that shadows cast by the sun tend to be parallel… to fake this (if you care to do so), you end up having to move the center out thousands and thousands of units… usually ends up way out in the void, which is fine, as long as the origin of the light entity is safely within the bounds of your world.