Questa discussione ha avuto 14 risposte

[Lady Honor]

I have three different night levels I have made that look good except for one. I use the exact same atmosphere settings and the same ambient light color in all three levels. in the first two the lighting is great. the shadows are a darker blue but you can still see the level. in the third tho, the shadows are so dark the characters look as tho they are walking in a black void. I've added lights to light the entire level in hopes to fix this, but to no avail. even considerably lightening the ambient color doesn't help. walls on one entire side are black and in those shaded areas you're lost in a void. any suggestions on how to lighten it up?

[Tchos]

During my project, I was perplexed by the lighting becoming darker and darker without any apparent change in my settings as I continued working on my project.  The light mapper was the single biggest obstacle in my work.  Take a look here and some later posts in that thread if you want to see my descriptions of it and see if it matches your experience, as well as what I did to compensate.  There aren't many posts total, since it was only a 2-week project, but I did finish it despite the light mapping problems.

[DarthParametric]

You might be better off cranking your light intensity up a bit, baking out the lightmaps, then manually darkening the maps in Photoshop, etc.

[Lady Honor]

tchos, I didn't know you made trouble in rainesfere. I love that mod! I'll try out some of your steps to correct it on the next run.

Darth I'm not certain what you mean by baking it out or how to edit it Photoshop. I have photoshop, but I wasn't aware you could darken lightmaps in it.

one thing did occur to me that is different in this level than in the others is that it has a water plane while the others dont. so I'm running the lightmapper now without the water to seen if that makes any kind of difference.

I also have a question about defining the exportable area. is there a way to expand the yellow and red areas without messing with the green area? the actual walkable area is relatively small, but I want it to pick up the vistas at a distance as well. they aren't a huge distance away but to put them in the yellow and red zones means making a much larger walk area than I need.

[Lady Honor]

nope. removing the water plane did nothing. that is a good thing tho because docks without water wouldn't work so well. Lol

I hate putting lights with no obvious light source, but that is what I'm going to do now. sigh....maybe I can fake it to look like moonlight. crossing my fingers, toes, and eyes. lol

[Tchos]

I'm glad my mod brought you some fun.    I remember I had problems with the vista objects and the red and yellow zones too, but I'm afraid I don't remember if I was able to correct them or not.

[DarthParametric]

Darth I'm not certain what you mean by baking it out or how to edit it Photoshop. I have photoshop, but I wasn't aware you could darken lightmaps in it.

Baking is just running the lightmapper and generating the lightmaps. It's called baked lighting, so the process is known as baking.

The lightmaps are just textures. They'll be in your Addin folder along with the other level assets. They should look something like this:



They'll be named according to the level and a chunk/room ID.

Editing them is pretty much a necessity, as manual clean up is the only reliable way to remove artefacts, given how useless the lightmapper is. For your purposes, you could try using the Hue/Saturation editor (CTRL+U) and dialling down the Lightness value. You'd want to use a consistent value across all maps. You could also use the Brightness/Contrast editor, but that tends to get a bit unbalanced at extremes. I'd start with one or two chunks/rooms and then load up the level and see how it looks. Make backups so you can test some different values.

[Tchos]

That's definitely how I'd do it if I were to make another module.  But for TiR, I covered up occasional black spots that appeared in random places after baking with placeables.

 

However, I'd use the Levels adjustment and adjust the gamma (the middle value), not use the lightness in Hue/Sat or Brightness/Contrast.

[Lady Honor]

umm...errr...i thank you both for your help, but this seems to require a little more knowledge about photoshop than i possess. lol  adding a few static lights (baked lights do nothing in the toolset for me no matter how high i set the intensity) in the really dark areas improved it a lot.  it's not as great as i had hoped, but they are no longer walking in the void.  ohhh....and I do the same thing you do, tchos.  if there's a black spot in the level, I drop a boulder on it. lol

[Tchos]

To make an image lighter or darker in the way that I suggest, open the file in Photoshop, and then either press Ctrl-L to open the Levels palette or find the Levels menu command under Image>Adjust>Levels (at least that's where it is in older versions.  I don't know about current versions).  It will show a histogram, with three small triangles underneath it.  One is black, one is grey, and the other is white.  Move the grey one either left or right until the image is as light or as dark as you want.  If you also want to make the darks darker or the lights lighter, you can move the black or the white triangle.

[DarthParametric]

find the Levels menu command under Image>Adjust>Levels (at least that's where it is in older versions.  I don't know about current versions).

It's basically remained mostly unchanged in the broad strokes for as long as I can remember, and I've been using it since at least PS7 over a decade ago.

[Lady Honor]

well that doesn't look so hard. I might actually can do that. thank you!

[Tchos]

I don't want to say what version I started using it on, but it was when they had an eye as their icon, and there was always a secret goofy alternate "About" screen in each version showing the code name and a custom image that worked in a weird cat picture if you held Ctrl and Alt while choosing Help>About (or while it was launching).

[DarthParametric]

there was always a secret goofy alternate "About" screen in each version showing the code name and a custom image that worked in a weird cat picture if you held Ctrl and Alt while choosing Help>About (or while it was launching).

They actually still have that, it gives a dedication to the Knoll brothers (although sans cat).

[Tchos]

Good to hear they still do it, though too bad about the cat.  They kept that cat going for a long time, though they made it harder and harder to find it in the picture.

 

(Sorry for the digression about Photoshop trivia!)