When trying get the lighting to look right in my map i came across a problem when trying to achive the following effect.
I want to have the light looking like its coming out of the lampshade and spreading out as shown in green, but the light cast appears squareish in game and scattered, I tried playin around with several settings include inner and outer bright angles, but to no avail...
_CLs_
maybe there's other solutions that im not thinking of right now, but i'm just saying the first thing that comes through my mind:
if you really want to confine your lightspot between the green lines, with a hard contrast between light and shadow (i.e.: not slowly fading on the edges), try the following:
make 2 brushes and place them in such a way that they block the light that you dont want, but do not block the light that you do want, i.e. place them around the opening of you lampsocket, but not in the opening. now cover all sides of the brushes with the "blocklight" texture. do not make them into entities, keep them world brushes. Have the lightspots have a wide enough angle, such that enough light slips between the brushes, but not too wide to surpass your brushes.
ingame, you wont see the brushes, but they will confine the light within the green lines! if you're not sure on how to place them, give me a yell and i'll draw you
This is just what I think, mainly from guesses, but it's probably not too far from reality:
The lighting model for Source uses an inverse quadratic model for intensity falloff. So I = 1/P(r), where I is the intensity of the light at a given point, r is the distance from the light, and P is a quadratic. P(r) = a*r2 + b*r + c, where a is the quadratic property of the light, b is the linear, and c is the constant. The constant affects what value the light starts at (at r=0), if you have a graphing calculator/software, you can use that and play with a,b,c values to see how they affect I.
To get a 2D picture of what the light would look like, you still have to position the light in 3D space and do some fancy geometry. It also wouldnt take bounces into account.
Reno, I'm about as lost as the next person when it comes to that, but I'll play around with it at some point.
At least you retain enough to recognize that your brain hurts. Mine flatlines more often than I care to publicly acknowledge.
You're the man Glass.
/me bows
if they need it as in the case of CLs, then it wouldn't be that hard, it would just be the equation in 2D. The equation you stated might be correct for lights, but it would need to be expanded for light_spots (my guess is with an angular component superimposed). i might be able to help you out on the maths if you want. not good a coder though, only Matlab. It would actually not be too hard in Matlab i think. Still i wonder if it's worth the trouble, since the in-hammer renderer pictures the outlines of the lightspot already, and with a few trial and errors you could have a pretty good estimation on the intensity
No, since that would just alter the resolution of the lightmap, and the amount of detail in the light.
Using the Block Light to seems to have no visable effect in game and I tried several times; covering the whole brush in Block Light or just one face with the rest Skip. Both times got no results
As for seting the constant to 20,000 that got rid of the light all togeather.
Anything I'am missing anything...
P.S Creating a program to quickly calculate how ur light is going to turn out would be a blessing...Good Luck
_CLs_
Some images in this post have been automatically down-sized, click on them to view the full sized versions:
Some images in this post have been automatically down-sized, click on them to view the full sized versions:
(as you can see the shape of the blocklight brush doesnt really matter, but the placement does) additional things i did: tilted the lightspot slightly towards the wall (without touching it), set the outer light angle equal to the inner angle, and , as Fishy noted, played with the lightscale of the wall texture a bit. you can do this via the texture application tool. having it at 16 gives jacked edges because of the necessary tilts/skew of the brushes. my lightscale is at 4. you can test what you like best. also i dunno how you like the effect at the base (rounded here), but you 'll be able to make that to your liking.
EDIT:
bah, nevermind that. just set your outer angle equal to your inner angle, play with the lightscale, and set your lightspot as in the pic:
