Lights, camera, action! Wait... where are those lights (hehe, plz help)?

[Pennington]

Okay, well i should have forseen this. I watched a few basic tutorials then started making my first hammer map. It's similar to de_rats (a giant room with you being a miniature person). Cept i think it's bigger, but i don't know how many units rats is.

NEway, i created my light source in the center of the room, on the ceiling. I was lookin for a pretty bright room with some shadows and stuff. NEway, the first thing i created was a wooden crate (that's about the size of a warehouse) and a sledgehammer leaning against it (the map's called minime_remodel, it's gonna be like a room that was once fairly chintzy, cept being remodeled cuz now it's kinda decayed looking. This gives me a logical reason for all of the holes and broken pieces of stuff, not to mention the giant tools and stuff ) I wanted to test out my ladder (which is the pole of the sledgemammer, reaching up to the rim of the crate which is eventually gonna have supplies in it) so i stuck the player spawn on top of the sledgehammer and finally got the map to open (even following the manual setup guide valve provides you for hammer it didn't work, but i got it to go eventually).

So, it's pitch black Cep i can kinda see my gun. The spawn point is right next to the gigantic crate, and so the light is blocked I assume. But shadows aren't pitch black like that in rl, and i should at least see the light at the edges of the crate. So what's wrong? Is my light just not powerful enuf (i just made it a grayish yellow light, all other settings on default) or what? Cuz it is a giant room which would be by default pitch black, so the standard light might not do it

Also, as a side note, how do i alter what the game recognizes brushes as? like it seems as if it's thinking my sledgehammer is wood, cuz i shot it and it sounded like wood. I was kinda hoping it determined by texture, but apparently not. How do i change the sound and penetration values and stuff on my brushes?

 

[Pennington]

okay, forget that last question. I think I was shooting the wall and sledge handle instead of the metal head. Sry, i retried it (with my light's view distance set to 10000, just trying diff shit) and i found the actual sledge part.

I still need suggestions on that light tho.

 

[The Dark Elf]

First lesson of lighting a CG scene.. just because the real life version of it might use a single light and light everything, a CG version wont look anywhere as good doing the same thing. Even with radiosity you need to setup fill lights here and there to bring out details and keep the lighting even and not overbright in the wrong places.

The problem is the way the point lights work, so the brighter you make one, the more it brightens near the point than it does further away. So a high setting will eventually light all your map.. But there will be this large area around your light source thats blown out. Which you don't want usually.

So use other lights to bring things out of shadow around the map, placing them in the best places, using various tints, just a little to even add to faked bounced light effects to add to the radiosity calculations.. Obviously I can't go into more detail cause the whole CG lighting thing is very long and in depth to explain and I really haven't the time to go into _that_ much detail.. Just follow the above tips and you should be fine.

 

[Pennington]

czn i just turn the light to what hammer displays for a test run?

 

[KoreBolteR]

its weird cos with mine, i have light_environment in the sky, and EVERYTHING is lit. theres NO shadows ... :/, and i tried compiling it with everything set too "normal" but my pc froze out and crashed..