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Old 21-11-06, 15:53   #5
Uvavoo
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Joined: Jul 2002
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PART 2: LET THERE BE LIGHT – Lighting your room

I am amazed when I see screenshots of quite nicely build rooms only to be totally let down by either poor, or more often non-existent lighting (ie ambient light only). Spending just a little time and effort in perfecting light really can make a room look a whole lot better.

The lighting panel



I am not going to baffle you with all the features at once, instead I will explain what everything does as and when we get to it. You may have to refer back to this pic now and then.

Open your project.
First open up your project if it is not already open. Always open winroomedit first and load the project from there. Don't double-click on the projects icon.

Okay, this is how the room looked when we left it. Yours should look similar to this. If not, go back to Old Kent Road.



As you can see the room looks very flat and boring, even Lara looks very cartoony in this light. This is because there are no lights added and only ambient light at full intensity is shown. Ambient light simply gives every texture an equal amount of light.

Adjust ambient light
The first thing we are going to do is adjust the ambient light. Ambient light needs to be set to very low or even to zero.
Always work from DARK to LIGHT. Ie start from a dark room.
At the right hand side of the Lighting controls you will find the controls for ambience.



Press alt key down and right click on any of the - (minus) buttons. Keep clicking until it reads 32, 32, 32. If you wish to have a tint in the ambience, alter the colours separately.

Your room should now look like this: (to view the lighting in the level editor just click the 'Lighting' button).



Yes, still looks horrible, only darker!

Info: Ok this is a tomb, in reality there will not be any light at all and the tomb will be pitch black!
What we have to do is Pretend there is a light source. In this room I am going to pretend the light source is from the center of the room at approximately ceiling height.


Using a 'standard' light
First we are going to use the 'standard' light. This is an 'all-purpose' light which you will probably use most often.

First rotate your room so you can see the ceiling clearly. (use PgUp and PgDn to zoom, cursor keys to rotate).
Click on the Light button, then click roughly in the center of the ceiling.



Ok, without doing anything else, just click on the Lighting button, you should see something like this:



This is already a huge improvement just by one click.

Adjusting the light
Next we are going to adjust this light. In order to see a visible
representation of the light we can press the 'Show Light Meshes' button.



You will see a red and a white 'sphere' around your light source. (don't worry the light will not bleed into any other rooms).



You can adjust the light by using the following:



Int = The intensity. Make the light brighter or darker.
Out = The furthest point the light will reach (the red sphere)
In = Represented by the white sphere, the distancce between the red and white sphere represents the 'falloff' of the light. This means the light will decrease gradually between these two spheres.
You can adjust the colour of the light using the colour+ and minus buttons.



Here I have made adjustments and changed the colour as an example.

Adding another light
I have added another light to add some 'fill' to the scene. You can use copy and paste buttons to duplicate a light and its settings.



And here is how this scene actually looks in game.


As you can see with only minimal lighting, we have produced a MUCH better looking room. Compare it with the unlit room below.

Last edited by Uvavoo; 21-11-06 at 15:56.
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