113 Antworten in diesem Thema

[Trampzabout]

you can download the level source and have a look at how the game's level designers setup the lighting for their levels. I found that the easiest way to get an idea of how different lights interact and look. The OC's levels usually have many many lights to get their lighting looking how it is, there is also a "brightness" field in the object properties for lights you can edit, its a float value, I find something like 0.01 is very dull while 2.0 is very(too) bright. You could try playing with that to see if it affects the brightening you are seeing.

[FalloutBoy]

JasonNH wrote...

In addition to these problems, a couple of us are noticing that ambient lights are not acting in the way that they are described on the wiki for exterior areas. My understanding is that ambient lighting allows you to modify the color of shadows, and it does. The problem is that it also immediately makes the entire area much brighter regardless of your sunlight values in the exportable area properties.

This makes it impossible to have a less than brightly lit exterior area with anything but the pitch black default shadow color. This is extremely limiting. Could someone from Bioware either correct our misunderstanding of how ambient lights function in an exterior area, or verify that there is currently a bug with ambient lights? Thank you.

Ambient works like a brightness knob on your monitor. It lightens the entire scene. If you want lighter shadows without affecting the overall brightness, you have to reduce your other light contributions to compensate. Generally you want to set your ambient level first, before you spend time tuning the other lights.

If you want more detail, this is generally how lighting is calculated in a shader:

Total light = ambient + diffuse + specular + emissive

Each one of those terms is calculated independantly of each other and they are all added together to get the final light value for the pixel.

[JasonNH]

Thanks, I've pretty much gathered that by the wiki but my problem is that as soon as I add an ambient light, I am doomed to have a level that is much brighter than I desire. It is almost as though the "View Models Fully Lit" option were applied to it. Even if I set my Layout Sunlight to pitch black, the area is lit far greater than I would like. Here are some examples:

No Ambient Light - Pitch Black Sunlight

Ambient Light Added - Same exact sunlight settings

As you can see, the ambient light pretty much makes my environmental settings irrelevant as soon as it is introduced. What I really want is an area lit something like this, but where I can also modify the shadows from the default darkest settings. I'm having no success with it.

Bearbeitet von JasonNH, 24 Dezember 2009 - 07:15 .

[FalloutBoy]

It looks like you just dropped an ambient light in there without adjusting its color. The default is 0.5, 0.5, 0.5 which is WAY too bright under any circumstance whatsoever. Set it to about 0.3, 0.2, 0.1, redo the lightmaps, and you should get something similar to the third pic you posted, dark and kind of orange.



It's kind of hard to pick an ambient color from the RGB picker since if it is bright enough to judge the color, then it's also too bright for an ambient light. So find a color you like on the color square, then drag the luminance slider down to about a quarter the way from the bottom.

[JasonNH]

Are you kidding me? I swear I have tried that a hundred times without seeing the results that I am now. It's a Christmas miracle. Thanks FalloutBoy, I guess you've got the mojo it needed.

[BioSpirit]

There is something wrong in ambient light settings. I created a dark cave with very low ambient light setting just about 5-10% of normal level and I had to setup the color values in 0.01 and the color intensity 0.00002 If this is proper behaviour then the scale must be logarithmic or something.

[BioSpirit]

I have uploaded a small utility to remove the black spots from the light maps. See project page for more details (social.bioware.com/project/1511/).  If you have some guestions about the utility use the project page discussions.

Here is a screen shot from unprocessed level (users.kymp.net/p501474a/spots.jpg)
Here is a screen shot after post processing the lightmaps (users.kymp.net/p501474a/spots_fixed.jpg)

Bearbeitet von BioSpirit, 27 Dezember 2009 - 07:48 .

[BioSpirit]

I have uploaded new version of the processor and the download shound be now visible for everyone. I didn't notice the visibility option before.

Bearbeitet von BioSpirit, 28 Dezember 2009 - 09:40 .

[FalloutBoy]

For anyone having trouble getting rid of the weird artifacts in your lightmaps I highly recommend BioSpirit's tool.

[Seryn]

I'm having trouble getting "Render Lightmaps" to work successfully, and have gone through everything I could find here and on the wiki, to no avail.

I created a new level per the wiki tutorial (including placing the two ambient and static lights), successfully generated pathfinding for the area, but get this error upon pressing the "Render Lightmaps" icon/button:

E: 14:11:51 - Failed to submit lightmap layout [cms002i]
E: 14:11:51 - Job submission process failed with a return code of '-1073741819'.

And I also get a Windows popup indicating "EclipseRay.exe has encountered a problem and must close."

I also cannot complete a "Do All Local Posts" (get a Local Posts Failed! message).

I have the following installed:

Windows XP
Toolset version 1.0.1008.0
ActivePython 2.5.4.4 32-bit mode
EclipseRay 1.2

Suggestions?

Bearbeitet von Seryn, 31 Januar 2010 - 10:32 .

[Seryn]

Well, after uninstalling and re-installing the Toolset (still the same version), I got it to work. I'm glad this is soooo easy . . .

[-Semper-]

BioSpirit wrote...

There is something wrong in ambient light settings. I created a dark cave with very low ambient light setting just about 5-10% of normal level and I had to setup the color values in 0.01 and the color intensity 0.00002 If this is proper behaviour then the scale must be logarithmic or something.

but then your character will also be this dark... normally your character has to be slightly brighter than the environment. right now the lighting will be rendered differently than bioware's inhous process. we won't get the same results like they do after rendering lights. in outdoor levels it's more or less irrelevant, indoor your levels (especially caves) look always too bright.

if you then lower down the settings of your ambient light all the characters will be hardly lit. that is because the ambient light is connected to the lighting of the characters through light probes.

bioware is using much brighter ambient lights (color settings around 0.30 - 0.40 and an intensity of 0.2 - 0.3) and the result is a nice looking uniform atmosphere of lights. if you render their levels with the same settings you will get a completely different looking output. to get better results we have to lower down the ambient lights to colors around 0.03-0.06 and the intensity to something like 0.005 - 0.1. this more or less creates a better looking ambient lighting, but your character will be too dark. you've got no chance to bright him up but with a lot of static lights not affecting area but characters... because that's why the people at bioware always place 3 - 4 static lights with a radius of 10000 at the corners outside of their levels just to affect the characters. this won't do anything in our levels. at least i can't see a difference. clearification by a dev is needed here^^

also could you please provide a better rendering engine?

[Baskervore]

Seryn wrote...

Well, after uninstalling and re-installing the Toolset (still the same version), I got it to work. I'm glad this is soooo easy . . .

Yeah, that helps a lot of things doesn't it? Software sucks.

[Elvhen Veluthil]

Checking my subscribed topics and run into this. Do I have to install this or was it integrated in the version 1.01?