 Some points about lighting |
Richard
Chieftain of Skyrim
Registration Date: 23.08.2006
Posts: 747
Location: Invercargill, New Zealand
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| Some points about lighting |
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I've noticed a lot of modders (even a few on these forums) make
interiors with really badly placed lights. As a perfectionist and I
suppose somewhat of a pedantic bastard, I'd like to mention a few
points:
- Try and make sure your light has some viable source. This is often
hard in dungeons so it's not as important, but house interiors should
adhere to this.
- Use the static meshes [Static/Lights] + lightbulb lights instead of
the lights in [Lights/Furniture]. This will afford you greater
flexibility. The main problem with the ones with the lightsource built
in is that the light eminates directly from the flame. Now this may
seem realistic, but it looks stupid when you place a sconce on a wall
because of the way then engine works; the light will not illuminate the
nearest piece of wall/wall that it is attached to.
- Fire however is usually ok with the flame nodes that emit light as they all have flicker turned on. Fires need to flicker!
- The bulbs you should use are the ones beginning with "Common".
- Don't place lightbulbs too far from the lightsource. Say you have a
window, place the lightbulb just inside of the window so the window is
more illuminated than the chair sitting 2 feet away.
- Remember to set about 50,50,50 as the values for Ambient under
Lighting tab in the cell properties. If it's still too dark, put
50,50,50 for the Directional properties values too.
- Don't place lights in each other's radii, otherwise you get super
brightness. The way to tell is if the illumination is going all greeny
bright yellow, you've got them too close.
- Try and have everything lit unless you're purposefully building a
house for some kind of mole-person who likes dark corners everywhere.
- Find a balance between the latter 2 points. Also, try and find a
balance that looks like it could either be day or night, where windows
are involved.
This post has been edited 4 time(s), it was last edited by Richard: 11.08.2007 15:23.
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11.08.2007 14:34 |
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Smokindan
Chieftain of Skyrim
Registration Date: 13.06.2006
Posts: 813
Location: Western Australia, Australia
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Good points all round, Rich. Good lighting, dynamic lighting in particular can make or break an interior for me.
Day/ night lighting isn't that hard if you look into it. It's just a
simple matter of having a script which enables/ disables
day/night/rain/dawn lights at a certain time of the day 
__________________
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->Sir Winston Churchill
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11.08.2007 15:02 |
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