Lighting Issue

[AlvinD]

Is there any way on Earth using UeD that i would be able to acheive ambient lighting through out a map using one light bulb? i want the lighting distributed evenly throughout eg. day time outdoors

[Jonas]

If it's a very small and not too detailed map. Otherwise you'll have to get creative. Good luck!

(Check out the daylight maps in 2027 and TNM to see how you might do it, but be aware that it's pretty much always going to look kind of bland, there's no way around it, which I think is why the daylight maps in both of our mods are set on cloudy, snowy days )

[Neveos]

I haven't had to do it yet, but I always thought the way I'd do it is to figure out what setting the light needs to be non-Occluding (like passing through walls, sorta like when you first place it before building the lighting... I'm sure there is a setting for it).

I'd give it a huge radius and set it somewhere in the map so there is a basic lowest light level.

Then I'd put another light where the sun should be with a huge light radius, which would create shadows and bring to light the places where the sun should be shining.

[Jonas]

Okay there's a couple of problems with that.

First off, having a huge-radius non-occluding light would almost certainly be incredibly ugly. If you're sure you don't need any properly dark areas, you're better off using zone lighting to bring up the minimum light level of the map. It's not a great solution because it drastically lowers the visual contrast of the level, but sometimes there's no way around it, and with a bit of tweaking, you can get it to look good enough (case in point: the Downtown sector in TNM). At the very least I recommend giving it a bit of colour, a subtle blue hue tends to work best.

Secondly, there's a maximum amount of surfaces a single light source is allowed to hit. Anything above that maximum will crash the game. So again, if your map is very small or not very detailed, having a "sun" point light would work, but otherwise you might have to use a couple of different point lights, and that's obviously a bit on the dangerous side as any area where the light of the two "suns" overlap could end up with some pretty weird shadows.

If you find that you can get away with using one or more suns, you can then add further smaller point lights around the map to approximate light bounce and ambient occlusion. We did a lot of that in the ABI Exterior in TNM, all the little caves and other nooks and crannies are lit by separate lights that have been given a (typically blueish) hue that corresponds to the colours of the nearby textures, so it looks like the sunlight is getting bounced off the ice and reflected around the walls with subtle blue tones. As with pretty much everything in UEd, it's not perfect, but it can look fairly convincing. If nothing else, it looks a hell of a lot better than zone lighting.

[Neveos]

Didn't know about zone lighting. Alternatively, you could have your normal sun light source, and possibly put a dimly lit non-occluding light at the entrance of doorways and windows with standard radii. At least the light would gradiate from point of source, as opposed to zone lighting.

[Jonas]

I don't understand why you would use a non-occluding light?

[Neveos]

A glow from the window. Ambience. I dunno, I think I'll just test it and see what it looks like. I'm not even sure how to make a light non-occluding.

-edit- it's not possible, and it looks terrible anyway. It lights unwanted things like the outside of the house. Also, a light with maximum radii is not very bright at a great distance, so a single sun is not likely to be believable. I think it will depend on how bright you can make your texture look, and DX textures are often very dark, and shadowy to begin with.

However, I've noticed that a small sky zone set can be easily lit to look very bright, if you want to set most of your buildings in the sky zone like castle clinton. In this case, you would still have to run around the map placing lights to mimic the location of the sun.

[Jonas]

Lights are just as bright as you want at great distance... if you make them brighter. Am I missing something? Brightness is a separate value from radius.

[Neveos]

Is it? There's volumebrightness, but does that affect the brightness or just the fogging effect in volumetric lighting? To my knowledge, I haven't found out how to brighten a light other than to increase its radius.

[DDL]

LightColor>>LightBrightness?

(along with LightHue and LightSaturation)

[Jonas]

Wow you've been missing out if you didn't know about that.

[Neveos]

Damn. That's one of those things where you forget when you've realized something. Like it was in a dream. I have dreamed mod development a few times.

[AlvinD]

Just for refernce its going to be on a map around 10k x 10k