Uniform light request

(G0-Gerbil) #1

I’m trying to light up me helms deep map realistically.
Outside I want it to be relatively bright, and inside, well, anything from pitch black upwards.

As a result I can’t use minlight or ambient.

The problem is that because you are in such a deep valley, the sky shader’s surface light doesn’t really achieve much in most of the map - you simply get bright edges to the mountains. Upping the sun light of course simply results in extreme contrast between shadow and sunlit areas. I want low contrast lighting (like in battery).

The only way I can currently think of sorting this is to dump tons of light entities around the outside of the map, which is going to be a pain to get a reasonably unifom lighting to.

What I was thinking of was a uniform light, one that emits a fixed amount of light (IE no fall-off), but is shadow casting. This means I could plonk a couple in the outside bits, and it would light it all nicely, but not the inside.

Actually, me mentioning no-fall-off has made me wonder if it’s possible to emulate this in a normal point light with a key / value pair of some description? Possibly ‘fade’ with a value of zero?

Either way it’d make lighting my maps easier - it’s not the first time I’ve run into this :slight_smile:

(ydnar) #2

Replace the surfacelight in your sky shader with q3map_skyLight.

Use these skies as a template. They combine penumbra sun (q3map_sunExt) with diffused sky lighting (q3map_lightmapFilterRadius and q3map_skyLight).

I think you’ll find this is exactly what you’re looking for.

y

(G0-Gerbil) #3

OK cool, I’ll look into it.
I assume I’ll need the latest (or a later) version of q3map2 for the penumbra stuff so I’ll grab that.

Once I’ve worked out how I managed to install it wrongly and fixed it, I’m sure it’ll sort it all out :slight_smile:

(G0-Gerbil) #4

Hot damn those skies of yours are nice :slight_smile:
The sunset one in particular - the clouds rock.
Are they free to use (presumably with your standard texture copyright notice)?

Dunno if they fix my problem as such, but I’m sure they will. Until then - lubberly!

(ydnar) #5

Yep, same license as the rest of my textures/shaders. Credit, © notice, link to Shaderlab.

If you go to the Quake3World forums, PJW posted a beta map using a custom sky along those lines I did, but with better lighting. It’d be near perfect for Helm’s Deep I reckon.

y

(Shallow) #6

Just thinking out loud:

Would be possible to have _minlight defined per entity in a similar way to _lightmapscale?

(G0-Gerbil) #7

I don’t often visit q3world, and am a bit lost trying to track it down - have you got any link to the thread it’s in? I’ll keep looking, but any shortcuts would be gratefully appreciated :smiley:

[EDIT] I think I’ve tracked his maps down - it was the results from the q3world search that threw me off - they come in reverse date order, and the dates are done in american format which always catches me out :slight_smile:

Now to track down the exact skybox you mean :slight_smile: