Resizing spotlights....

[CorwinWeber]

Hmmmmm.

 

Ok, I checked out a tutorial on doom3world about lighting. Apparently doing what I want to (resizing a spotlight) is easy. According to the tutorial.... just alt-left mouse button to drag the control points around....

 

...and when I do it in darkradiant the mouse cursor grabs my grid window and drags it around. What's the DR equivalent to alt-lmb?

 

For that matter.... let me make sure I don't have some key combo in my window manager that I'm tripping over....

 

** edited to add **

 

Ok, nevermind. Just did the exact same thing with my WM config window. It's not DR after all.

 

** edit again **

 

Ok, fixed that.... but it still doesn't work. (Now alt-lmb just doesn't do anything at all.) How do you adjust the length and radius of a spotlight in darkradiant? I gather it's alt-lmb in the regular doom editor....

Edited June 5, 2010 by CorwinWeber

[Serpentine]

Not 100% sure if theres a better method, however I just do it by pressing "v" and dragging around the vertices.

[CorwinWeber]

Not 100% sure if theres a better method, however I just do it by pressing "v" and dragging around the vertices.

 

** blinks **

 

You can do that on lights?

 

** edit **

 

Doh.

 

Yeah, you can do that with lights. It's clumsy but it works. Thanks.

Edited June 5, 2010 by CorwinWeber

[Mr Mike]

It shouldn't be clumsy if you select the correct vertex. There's 3 to choose from so make sure you use the correct view (ctrl-tab) to select the one you want to move and then move to another view so that you can position it where it needs to go.

 

It only ever gets clumsy if you accidentally select 2 vertices at the same time.

[Bikerdude]

I just do it by pressing "v" and dragging around the vertices.

 

same here

[CorwinWeber]

It shouldn't be clumsy if you select the correct vertex. There's 3 to choose from so make sure you use the correct view (ctrl-tab) to select the one you want to move and then move to another view so that you can position it where it needs to go.

 

It only ever gets clumsy if you accidentally select 2 vertices at the same time.

 

Yeah, well frequently even with only one selected.... it goes wonky. It feels like the sort of awkward controls that all 3d editing environments are going to have until we get touch sensitive holographic displays....

[Fidcal]

Remember you can also select vertices in the camera view as well as grid if one or the other is awkward plus you can use Alt + the arrow keys to move selected vertices grid point by grid point at times where mouse drag is awkward. Grid size is also important; you can't drag a vertex with fine control if the grid is coarse. Also relevant is http://bugs.angua.at/view.php?id=2216 Cloned projected light does not show projection until map reloaded which is resolved in DR 1.3.1.

[OrbWeaver]

Try to avoid dragging the control vertices "sideways", along the boundary of the light. This will cause the rectangle to become a parallelogram, which is probably not what you want. They should be dragged inwards or outwards, either towards or away from the center of the projection rectangle.

[ungoliant]

Try to avoid dragging the control vertices "sideways", along the boundary of the light. This will cause the rectangle to become a parallelogram, which is probably not what you want. They should be dragged inwards or outwards, either towards or away from the center of the projection rectangle.

 

if the spotlight is at almost any sort of weird angle at all, aggravation will surely ensue. It took me 45 minutes to set up 2 spotlights looking up at an angle and look fairly decent.

[Fidcal]

I don't use the vertices to turn spotlights. I turn off vertices and turn the light using the arbitary transformation dialog. I then use vertex mode only to change the width and length.

[ungoliant]

I thought the hard and fast rule was that you don't rotate light sources, as it makes a total mess of things, but instead just drag the center point and move it around. Does this not apply to spotlights then?

[OrbWeaver]

There shouldn't be any problems rotating lights (although it is generally unnecessary for pointlight sources), this may be required for a projected texture (such as a window) which needs to face a different direction.