Editing and Customization > Community Releases
Basement Remake
VC:
I'm going to vote with leaving it lit, but work on making the light sources look nicer. I"m seeing washed out blobs and that sucks. Granted, Source seems to love to do that, and my tinkering with Hammer has always left me throwing nearby objects because the light sources look awful without spending eternity tweaking it.
Just ensure there are some dark spots. Canon Basement is well lit, but it looks dark because of the netural textures used throughout. Only the one hallway with the T-junction into the Weapon F spawn room is actually shadowed into darkness.
Ultimately, Source looks bad in low-light conditions, so keep the general lighting but use variations between light and dark, and beautify your light sources.
Jonathon [SSL]:
How would you recommend I get rid of the white blobs? Simply by dimming the lights?
VC:
It really depends. If no objects will be getting near the light source you can back it away from the wall. That works well but if you do that near objects they will become improperly lit. Worst is doing that with a ceiling light, where the actual light point will wash out the viewmodel's hands, and light them from below if they jump at the light, which is exactly backwards.
If I recall, for dim lights like cage lights, using something like Linear 2 instead of Quadratic 1 attenuation and tweaking the brightness a lot worked well in some testing I did. Depends on the ambient, where exactly you put the light point, and so on.
Also, pay attention to how many lights are on a surface, since you will get butt-ugly stair-step shadows if a surface has only one light on it and the light is rather distant. You can either raise the lighting detail on that surface (good if it is a small face), or just add some more light sources from different sides to smooth it out. You can't get a nice sharp shadow at range with source lighting.
Jonathon [SSL]:
Does this look any better? (Ignore the bullet decals)
VC:
Not bad, though it's not centered. Stay on grid! Yes, that's difficult with the way models are handled, but get one perfect, then copy it along with a brush that is on grid. Then when you move the brush the model will stay in-sync. Delete the 'handle' brushes afterwards and you're fine. (I suggest texturing your handle brushes with SKIP so they won't interfere with anything and will be easy to spot.)
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