[FS BladeKiller]

Globalfog is new and is locked. The mapper has a few cvars he/she can use in a devmap to determine the colour and amount of fog they want.

Cubemap Probe is the location of camera for the cube map for specular mapping. Place at head height in the centre of an area.

Use fade .1 and linear for your fill lights.

Use targeted lights as much as possible to make your specular maps work better.

I have a low level entity sun in Tombs. I have changed Prague since the last release and removed the sun from its skybox shader. This got rid of some ugly shadows. So Prague is now light solely by low value (max value is 75) fade .1, linear lights and targeted lights (all the lamps).

[FS CMM|Johnnyenglish]

BladeKiller, on 13 August 2011 - 06:08 AM, said:

Globalfog is new and is locked. The mapper has a few cvars he/she can use in a devmap to determine the colour and amount of fog they want.

Thank you, that's great, it does look amazing.

[[T]BludShoT]

What do you mean around 10 minutes in the video where you talk about painting on the lighting? I took it to mean that for example, instead of having lights in the map that shine onto surrounding walls, that you can't have that anymore and that now you have to actually paint on the shadows and highlights right onto the texture (on one of the layers, specular or whatever). If that's what it means then isn't lighting a map going to be many times more time consuming than it is now? Instead of throwing a texture on a dozen walls and sticking in a few light entities to dynamically (at compile time) light them, you'd have to painstakingly texture the light onto each surface?

Is that what that meant? :o


EDIT: Then you go on to talk about using light entities to light the walls. Here's what I don't understand: isn't that exactly how things were done in 4.x? The video talks about it as if it's a new way of lighting the map, but, in 4.x you would texture your walls with textures that had no lighting already in them (for example, a wall texture of flower wallpaper - it wouldn't already have the illusion of light lighting it up), and then you would put light entities in the map to cast light on it. Isn't that the same thing you're describing between 11 and 16 minutes in the video?

more Edit: Then later around 26 minutes you elaborate about the lighting technique, and I think I really understand what you mean. Basically you're saying that in a lot of 4.x and earlier maps, mappers would use huge bright light sources and over saturate their maps and not use tiny light sources to create such subtle lighting effects. What confused me about the lecture (about this topic) is that this is something people could always have done. You could do it in quake 1 (I did) and you could do it in 4.x if you wanted to. Nothing stopping you in 4.1 from making a fairly dark map and putting lots of tiny lights next to walls to give nuance. So, that was my confusion, that you seemed to be presenting this as a new technique or HD specific technique when it isn't new really.


I guess the entire 'painting with lights' analogy doesn't work for me. I don't really consider it painting with lights because to me that implies you are somehow painting the light into the texture. To me it's not 'painting with lights' it's 'putting lots of subtle lights everywhere' - although I can see why someone might want to call it painting with lights. But if you go in your house and place lights and lamps all around the whole house to give it a good look, you wouldn't call that painting with lights right.

Interesting video. I guess a lot of the point is that while this lighting technique isn't new, it is something that is 'required' in HD if you want the specular (and bump?) maps to look good - whereas if you just plaster tons of saturated lighting like we see in 4.x, it will reduce or ruin those map effects.

This post has been edited by BludShoT: 15 August 2011 - 10:42 PM

[FS Frankie V]

Yupe it is nothing new but a reexamination of the process based on a need to reorder the process based on the addition of just these two maps. The ideal of course is to get away from shader effects, which is now a resource hog, and make them more utility in nature and move forward so we can at some point use shake and bake applications like AutoDesk “The Beast”

[C.M.M.cec.]

BladeKiller, on 13 August 2011 - 06:08 AM, said:

Globalfog is new and is locked. The mapper has a few cvars he/she can use in a devmap to determine the colour and amount of fog they want.

Cubemap Probe is the location of camera for the cube map for specular mapping. Place at head height in the centre of an area.

Use fade .1 and linear for your fill lights.

Use targeted lights as much as possible to make your specular maps work better.

I have a low level entity sun in Tombs. I have changed Prague since the last release and removed the sun from its skybox shader. This got rid of some ugly shadows. So Prague is now light solely by low value (max value is 75) fade .1, linear lights and targeted lights (all the lamps).

What does fade exactly do?
A technical question because it fits here: how do you make targeted lights? I know about three (or more) different ways of how to do them but I never learned what's right (at the moment, I use a target_position and link it with the light entity with ctrl+k). That's why I asked Frankie about a screenshot of Radiant. I knew it was more an idea than a tutorial but if the newbies want to try it out they have to know how to do it :)

[FS BladeKiller]

Don't use target position; that's to tell a player your location. To make a targeted light use info/info_null. I link the info_null to the light with target and targetname as explained in the urbanterror.def file. Fade diffuses the light attenuation on linear lights so the falloff is gradual and blends into environment so you don't get hard changes in lighting. The def file explains what all of the options for the entities do. You should have 3 dialogue windows in the entity inspector. You may need to pull them open if you haven't already.

[CMM|Rylius]

Uh, I think you messed up target_position and target_location there.

info_null is removed during spawning, so it doesn't contribute to the ingame entities while target_position and info_notnull stay ingame.
So you're best off using info_null for lights.

[FS CMM|v3nd3tta]

ty for declaring that :)
I remember a map where I did the wrong thing heh ;) (u know which one)

[C.M.M.cec.]

Okay, thank you. :)
I never noticed that these keys are explained in the entity inspector.