Ambient colors (to blue or not to blue)

[Goldwell]

So i've met a bit of a crossroads as i'm doing the final tweaks on my map and I can't decide if I like the look of a cool blue ambient over the entire world or not. I've set my ambient_world entity to have a little tinge of blue to it and I like the look of it but at the same time it feels a little too much. With the blue tinge the _color is set to "0.01 0.06 0.10" and just regular is set to "0.1 0.1 0.1"

 

What do you guys and gals think of this? which looks better to you and why?

 

I picked the scene below because the lights in the warehouse are by default blue and this is the most blue area of my map so with the ambient light and the blue warehouse lights this is the most intense color mixture i'll get throughout the rest of the map if that makes sense.

 

Blue ambient:

 

 

 

 

 

Regular ambient:

 

 

 

 

 

 

edit: here's another more normal scene for comparisons sake

 

Blue ambient:

 

 

 

 

 

Regular ambient:

 

 

 

 

Edited April 10, 2016 by Goldwell

[demagogue]

Since forever, movie directors have put blue filters on lights to express that it's night time light. Sometimes they even put a bluish filter over the camera lens. It's something you need to do especially when you need a lot more light than nighttime would have, but you still need to convey that it's nighttime. I think that's it's main function, more than art direction per se, but aesthetic is part of it too.

 

Looking at these pictures, without the blue filter it looks more "natural" stylized, and warms punctuate the cools. With the blue filter I think it looks more consistently chilled, and it keeps the mood (i.e., doesn't let any "warms" slip in). My intuition is to go with the more consistent aesthetic, if you're asking about which to side with. These are places the player should feel an unrelenting unwelcomeness. They aren't supposed to be here & it's not the time for receiving guests. So don't let warms slip in to make them feel any at home. That's how I'd think about it.

[Goldwell]

That's a really unique way of looking at it and very true. I found something pulling me towards the blue and I think what you mentioned was it, the unrelenting unwelcomeness.

 

Also I feel like it makes the map as a whole feel more unique and it's own, but i'm afraid maybe players will get sick of the blue especially considering the map is fairly sizeable.

[Obsttorte]

You can alter the ambient light using the location system, so it doesn't look the same everywhere. So maybe blue outside and something more orange like on the insides. However, I would not use such a high color saturation as it looks quite unnatural imho. Maybe something in the middle of the first and second shots.

[Goldwell]

I changed the warehouse to include regular lights now so it looks like this with the blue filter now

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe in the screenshots it doesn't convey as well but actually playing the map and moving around it looks very natural with the blue filter. It seems to define the shadows more and the areas that are regular light look normal still.

 

I still need to tweak it but overall it adds a nice feel to it.

[Epifire]

Tweaked version of the warehouse is good. TDS was where I came onto the scene with the Thief games, so all the blue is definitely very reminiscent of Ion Storm's take on the game. Epi-Approved!

[Anderson]

The regular ambient blue demonstrates why to many Thief 4's design of the city came to appear less enigmatic than Thief DS's Overlook Mansion or Rutherford Castle.

[Spooks]

Firstly, from a flexibility standpoint, this is how I did the ambients in KoD (and how I'll probably keep doing it for any other FMs). My ambient_world light is set to 0.01 0.01 0.01. It's the minimum that isn't total darkness, so that the gamma slider works.

 

Then, I consider the outside portions of the map as one huge location, and I put an info location entity, naming it info_location_global. On it, I put my actual ambient light, which used to be 0.04 0.06 0.05 (green tint, also past tense cause I changed it now). Any time the player goes inside some other location, I can change the ambient as I wish or just put the same value the outside has.

 

Why the first step is important is this: suppose it's bright outside but you enter a cellar. It's going to be dark. Now, if you just had ambient_world set to, say 0.3 0.3 0.3 (overcast day outside), even if you put something like 0.1 0.1 0.1 on your location settings for your cellar, the actual light that you would get in there would be 0.4 0.4 0.4. That's because the lights are additive, and ambient_world is above locations in the hierarchy and will add to everything.

 

This is why I recommend you, and anyone else, set ambient_world's luminance to be as low as the darkest expected place in your map, or just to the minimum of 0.01 - so you can additively add light through location settings without any worry. For KoD, this is how Adam's room works, it wouldn't be so dark if I hadn't set it up the way I described (since Goldwell has beta-tested the map he'll know what I'm talking about, for the rest of you - it's gonna come out soon enough!)

 

Regarding the color, I like it, but make sure to vary the color tints between locations so it doesn't end up looking samey, as Obsttorte suggested. He also mentions the saturation and it's true, the ambient is supposed to represent the overall bounced light in a location and since it can't be anything more than an average, it's wise not to spike the saturation too much.

 

TDS I'm pretty sure also used atmospheric fog, and if you can find some way to make the awful foglights work nice for you, I think it would give it a lot more depth. I think Shadowhide posted a screenshot here of a WIP where he had muted purple fog and a blue ambient complementing each other, which is more or less the TDS look. Looked really nice.

[Melan]

I would go with a natural light, or a very-very low teal/greenigh blue/purplish blue. Your 0.06 is very heavy. It doesn't have to be more than a very slight tint.

[Moonbo]

It's personal preference at the end of the day, but I agree with Melan. In my maps I used a very slightly blue ambient and it seemed to work well.

[Goldwell]

I opened up house of locked secrets and pinched your _color for the world ambient and here's how it turned out.

 

I do really like the very blue style however too much of it would start to look bad but I think your ambient levels are a balance inbetween the two (moreso leaning towards the natural light).

 

Natural

 

 

 

 

 

My blue

 

 

 

 

 

Moonbos blue

 

 

 

 

 

I definitely want to have some blue tinge there because I really like the style and when you are in a room with bright lights it really contrasts the shadows better in my opinion.

 

I think Moonbo's blue ambient works the best out of them actually because for reasons you guys suggested it's a balance between the two, just a little bit to be noticeable but not over the top

Edited April 10, 2016 by Goldwell

[Melan]

Yeah, that's more subtle, and yet noticably bluish.

[SeriousToni]

I personally like the blue touch. It looks a bit more like Deadly Shadows than classic Thief, but the lightning in Deadly Shadows was awesome anyway

[Goldwell]

I personally like the blue touch. It looks a bit more like Deadly Shadows than classic Thief, but the lightning in Deadly Shadows was awesome anyway

I really like it too but i'm afraid it will be too much for most players. Having the little tinge of blue is a nice touch. If you'd like I could send you the .map with the strong TDS blue tinge on release

 

Just message me if you still want it once my maps released and I'll PM it to you or I suppose you could edit the ambient world yourself.

[SeriousToni]

Haha thanks for that offer, but I will spare you the extra work and I'll edit it by myself
What are the actual RGB colours for that screenshot?

[Goldwell]

For the really blue original one?

0.01 0.06 0.10

 

Edit: or the actual RGB 3,15,25

Edited April 11, 2016 by Goldwell

[grayman]

Why the first step is important is this: suppose it's bright outside but you enter a cellar. It's going to be dark. Now, if you just had ambient_world set to, say 0.3 0.3 0.3 (overcast day outside), even if you put something like 0.1 0.1 0.1 on your location settings for your cellar, the actual light that you would get in there would be 0.4 0.4 0.4. That's because the lights are additive, and ambient_world is above locations in the hierarchy and will add to everything.

 

 

You should double-check this empirically. Ambient lights being additive has not been my experience. Nor does the Location Settings wiki say they're additive.

 

When entering a location whose info_location entity has an ambient_light setting, that setting overrides the setting of ambient_world. If the info_location entity doesn't define ambient_light, the default setting from ambient_world is used.

 

So you can set ambient_world to the default outside ambient you want, and give each of the indoor locations its own ambient setting, including pure black.

[SteveL]

From the last set of comparison shots in the bedroom, I like the moonbo blue. It's the one that desaturates the colours in a cool-toned night-time way without attracting attention. The full-on blueness in your factory where you have blue lights too looks gratifyingly tense though

 

@Spooks: Like grayman said, the ambient setting on location entities modifies the main ambient_world, it's not in addition.

 

@everyone: There's a bug with setting location ambients to 0 0 0 by the way (to be fixed in 2.05), so use 0.004 0.004 0.004 if you want to remove ambient light from a location.

[Spooks]

You should double-check this empirically.

 

I just did and you're right, and I'm wrong. It's really weird because I swear I had the problem I described in my map and that's how I fixed it. Totally weird.

 

@steve: Oh, this might just be what happened, as I wanted a location to be completely pitch black. I must've ended up putting the ambient there at 0.01 0.01 0.01 after doing what I described and thinking that fixed it. That explains it!

[s.urfer]

Is it just me and my monitor settings, or do the blue versions look much darker?

 

I can make out much more details in the regular ambients.

 

Wouldn't this mean, one has to change the gamma/brightness settings specifically for the "blue" maps?

[Epifire]

Well one thing to note. If you're going to go with a lot of blue colors, mixing with harsh reds can be an issue. Dark/diffused amounts of green is a great way to offset red so that your blending doesn't produce purples as much. I found that out when working on my very red corridor scene that blue and reds have a strange tendency to look overly bright and colorful when combined together. The example here you can see the green almost comes off as more of a grey but it makes the darker parts of the scene more subtle...

 

 

 

But if using green it's usually much less noticeable, and preserves your reds more. Just thought I'd throw that out there as something to keep in mind. This may help you a lot when transitioning torches for instance, from an indoor scene to an outdoor location.

Edited April 13, 2016 by Epifire

[SeriousToni]

Is it just me and my monitor settings, or do the blue versions look much darker?

Yes they're a little darker. I think it should not be on the player to adjust the brightness settings in the menu, but on the mapper to make it look as equal as possible in brightness (but with the blue colour tint) to the common other maps.

Edited April 13, 2016 by SeriousToni

[Taquito]

I think the blue ambient looks perfect for interiors. Besides the windows are blue so they are reflecting their color as well. For exteriors it should be more subtle as the light that emanates from the moon.

Edited May 9, 2016 by Taquito