Basic lighting reference.

[Xzzy]

In trying to light my map in a decent fashion, I ended up with a bsp "gallery" of lighting that I felt would better serve the world if it was put on a webpage with a bit of explanation.

 

I did this mostly because finding good q3/jk2 lighting resources is damn near impossible anymore.. I spent hours and didn't find anything decent.

 

At any rate, you can view it here:

 

http://tru7h.org/lighting/

 

Also on the page is a link to download the pk3 of this map so you can see what it all looks like in-game.

 

The effects shown are very basic. The goal was to display what the major features of Q3 lighting are, and maybe help me come up with new tweaks to get even more interesting effects.

 

If you have any ideas, feel free to submit them.. I'm still hunting for the nirvana of lighting technique.

[Drakewl]

thx, very helpful

 

you should post it in the sticky resources thread

 

i suggest to create some further examples with shaderlighting (texture emits light) only and mixed examples with shaderlighting and entity-lighting together

 

 

even mixing !!!low!!! saturated colored lightentities with each other should give some nice effects, cuz mixing high saturated colorlights looks somewhat odd

 

 

keep up the good work

[Green Hornet]

i need some help lighting my map. i saw your website and it is nicely done. you seem pretty knowledgable in lighting so im going to try asking you. but what about lighting an outside level and the skybox. i know that some shaders and textures have a natural glow but how can i have textures that dont emit light emit light? some one told me to do all this stuff with sun and and light color but i dont get it. can ya help? please make it simple!

[Xzzy]

i was planning on talking about that briefly on the page but I haven't done it yet.

 

The short of it is, you need a text file in the shaders directory that tells the software (both the game and the map editor) there is something special about this texture.

 

In this text file is the actual name of the texture, a few variables for controlling how the game treats the texture, then finally the settings for controlling the lighting. I really don't know all the details well myself, the way I get it working is basically cut and paste from other shader files.

 

If you want to play around with it, download the pk3 from my webpage up there. Open the pk3 in winzip and extract it all somewhere.

 

In there you should see a directory called "shaders". Open one of the files in there in notepad. Really all you have to change is the name of the textures in use, there are three instances in the files I used. These are basically just path names to the image.. textures/yavin/image, without the file extention.

 

Save this file when you have it the way you want it and drop it in the shaders dir in your base directory. Doesn't matter what the name of the file is.. jk2 reads them all. So just call it something convenient for you.

 

Now whenever you set a brush to the texture you applied a shader to, when you compile and load it in game the respective texture will give off light.

[Xzzy]

BTW I posted my first update to that page.

 

Basically I figured out that you can delete shader files after doing the bsp compile and the "glowy texture" effect won't appear because that is calculated on runtime.

 

Yet you still get the benefits of using textures for creating even smooth diffuse light.