Streetlight lighting

[HappyCheeze]

I'm touching up my map, going through fixing texture misalignments etc etc

 

One thing I've never been able to really figure out is how to make the street lamps look alight, I mean I place the lights in or on the lamps and it just doesn't look right.

 

Any way of optimizing that look?

 

thanks

-HC

[jdude]

Mmm, I don't quite understand what you are asking. Are you asking how to make them look good or how to optimize performance?

 

In terms of visual quality, it depends on what kind of map you have. Personally I try and keep a variety of lamps rather than have 4 or more street lamps on one given street. For example, here's a pic of a map I'm messing with:

There's 2 street lights, both electric, one streetlight mounted onto the wall instead of a regular streetlight like the other two, and then there's the torch. I find that instead of using a setup that resembles modern highways and streets [Tons of similar lamps] pretend that when the city [your city] was made, they weren't sure how the lighting would be, so they had to clamp some lights onto walls and make a mess ect ect.. It's kind of like a cheesy background story, but it's how I work haha

 

As for performance:

There's some info about ambient lighting here:

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/Category:Lighting

This can improve FPS if you use virtual I believe.

 

And just mess around with your lights I guess would be the only option I could think of. For example, you want to try and avoid overlapping lights, that causes lag, moving lights cause lag and a lot of shadows cause lag.

 

You can also optimize performance of the lighting calculations by compiling with dmap shadowopt 2 <mapname> when you compile.

 

You also want to apply noshadows 1 to the model your using for the lamps so it doesn't cast a shadow.

[HappyCheeze]

This picture here if you can see it,

 

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3047...p;id=1263360620

 

I'm doing a big overhaul of my map with texture corrections and lighting quality.

 

These are old pictures of my map, but as of now those lights there haven't changed and they don't look too good to me.

 

Nice pic btw, pretty

[Komag]

I like to put a small little bright noshadow light right up under the lamp section, so it makes it look more bright under there as it should.

[Baddcog]

I'm not loggin in to facebook to see your pic. You should try a more friendly site like imageshack or something.

 

 

 

Which lights are you using?

[HappyCheeze]

I'm not loggin in to facebook to see your pic. You should try a more friendly site like imageshack or something.

okay heres the non login one... I think.

 

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2012...p;id=1263360620

Which lights are you using?

 

I'm just using regular light entities

 

 

again these are my old crap ass pix, going through my map I can't believe I missed all these painfully obvious texture misalignments, I don't know what I was thinking.

 

Now I'm even more conscious of my texturing and beveling and lighting and all that jazz

[jdude]

That sounds good If you want you should let us try out the map when your done and apply for Beta mapper position You basically have to be creative and mess around until it looks as good as you want it to look.

[Baddcog]

Still hard to tell. The pics are fairly small.

 

We're finishing up the candles now so they will look better. I've given them a glow and more size variations. Tels has been working on physics and prefabs so they are easy to create, move around, and are frobbable. (alot of this was already done, just fine tuning).

 

Looks likew you are using my streetlamps. I have improved them some and want to do more before release so I will look into the glass and see if it needs adjusted some. I've also added shadow meshes that look pretty good.

 

Looks alright from what I can tell but when posting screens in the future you should make em bigger and also increase the gamma in photshop. Screens come out of doom alot darker than in game so it's almost impossible to see what's going on. Same with T2, was always better when people adjusted the brightness.

[HappyCheeze]

So than I'll have to wait till beta mapper status to use the new and improved lamps and all that jazz :-P

 

I've been making more progress on it just going through it and making things look better.

 

Once its done I'll definatly put it up for all of you guys to play,

 

 

And I'll touch up the brightness on my screenshots in gimp next time I put them up.

 

For bigger screenshots, should I just increase my comp resolution? or is there another way to do that?

[Komag]

You can tell Doom 3 what resolution to make a screenshot, even huge like 4000 X 3000!

[Baddcog]

Well yeah, that's part of the deal. Beta mappers get current stuff.

 

But the names will be the same so when you get Beta or DM is released the new models will just override the old ones.

 

There are some instanced where you might need to change stuff (like if an origin on a model is moved for physics, it will need realigned)

[BEAR]

Just as a friendly tip, if you've not done it, look into visportals. You're map looks easier to do this in than mine, but they are currently pounding my ass so don't go too far in before you find out whether the map will work or not.

 

What I did was create a sample map to play around with them and see what works and what doesn't, what breaks things and what doesn't. Not that its helped me that much in my regular map but you cant start that too soon methinks.

[HappyCheeze]

Just as a friendly tip, if you've not done it, look into visportals.

Thanks I'll check that out