best way to light the whole room?

Guys, whats the best way to light a room, and not putitng 200 "light" entities in it.

putting one in the middle aint good either, coz when i stand in the middle itll be way to bright...

light at about 55-75 in various parts works well. Also spots work good too.

you want an even light throughout the room, walls, ceiling, floor? Not sure why, if so, but...

You can use one plain "light" entity just fine ( more if it's an L shaped room ), but set the constant to somewhere above 50000 depending on the size of the room. Mkae sure the brightness is way lower than you think, try around 10 and play around with that

okay, thanks guys, ill try your suggestion!

GizmoTheGreen said:
Guys, whats the best way to light a room, and not putitng 200 "light" entities in it.

How longs a piece of string? Really, there are many different ways to light a room. The most common way is to use a point based entity called "light". You go to the Brightness field and there are four values, the first three are red, green, blue and the last is the brightness value. So for example 255 0 0 200 is a red light with brightness set to 200, which is sufficient to light up a small/moderately sized room. You shouldn't ever need 200 light entities to light up a room, one single light entity has the ability to light up any sized room, perhaps you've done something wrong.

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Aaron's Stuff

You could also use texture lights.

i dont know squat about texture lights, has to do with lights.rad?

aaron, i would like to remember to have tried using only one light per room, resulting in when being too close to the light its just way to bright! and in the other of the room it about normal and then by the walls its too dark, so i need several lights :/

Haymaker is right about playing around with the "constant" parameter. But there are two others you can equally play around with to get the effect you're looking for.

-For one though, you complain about it being bright when you walk up close to it? -Well, this is what real light does. If you don’t add a model in the room to show where the light is coming from then yes, it will look weird when you walk up to it. What you can do, is place it up higher so that the player can't walk "through" it. Although, I'm not sure what your exact scenario here is, I imagine it still needs to look realistic. All lights have sources; choose yours by adding a prop_static and searching for a 'world model'.

-About the Linear, Constant, and Quadratic keyvalues under your regular 'light' entity. Check out here for a good VDC explanation on what they do and how they work. FYI, this is a feature available in all Source games, but doesn't get used very often. I'm guilty of it too, but if you want an area to have perfect lighting, then this is the way to do it.

-Specifically, I would try giving the 'Constant' value a 1 and the other two (Quadratic & Linear) a value of 0. The Constant value will let the brightness of your light extend for infinity and not 'fall-off' (the shadows in corners you're seeing will go away). Read-up on that link to find out what you can do with the other keyvalues to fix your problem.

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

thanks Riven! i will try it immediately!

i followed your suggestion, and in some cases the light still falls of :/
but its alot better than before though!

Give us some screenshots.

Aight, working on some screens.
it's okay if i post some other issues im having?

Okay, here is some screens, first, how i made a light in hammer.

click to enlarge:
[img]http://img389.imageshack.us/img389/7915/light1hammerav2.th.png[/img]

next is how it looked ingame (the screenshot is for some reason darker than it appeared ingame)
[URL=http://img407.imageshack.us/my.php?image=gmgizmostruct0013rk5.jpg][IMG]http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/4145/gmgizmostruct0013rk5.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
(its weird how the preview of my post ignores all newlines! srsly wtf!?)

another problem i have is this wall, part of it is a func_door, see how the shadows bork?
[URL=http://img122.imageshack.us/my.php?image=gmgizmostruct0015yv2.jpg][IMG]http://img122.imageshack.us/img122/3312/gmgizmostruct0015yv2.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

I can only recommend having a look at the example-VMFs by Valve (you'll find them in your source sdk folders). Do it like they do it.

I usually put a spot light facing down, with a broad radius, a high constant factor and brightness of about 500 in the middle (under the ceiling) of a room. It simulates most artificial light sources quite accurately. Try thinking of giving the light some color (into the yellow-ish) as well.

The func_door probably looks that way because it is slightly stuck in a world-brush and doesn't receive any light during the RAD compile. I recommend using a prop_door_rotating instead of a brush-based entity. Brush-based entities can act weirdly when it comes to lighting since they are lit separately.

Hey Reaper47, long time no see here!

Well think of it this way, if you tried to illuminate a room that big with one lightbulb it would be bright near the bulb and dark toward the corners of the room.

Rather than trying to light an empty room in a blank video game world, you could decide what the room is for, and design the lighting based on where light would be needed in a real-life equivalent.

For example: A laboratory will have lots of bright, even light; a warehouse will have large lights spaced out above stacks of of storage, maybe some handheld/clampable/hooked lamps plugged into extension cords; a residence will have ceiling fixtures, floor lamps, table lamps, etc.

additional light accents can come from things like exit signs, computer monitors, fires, windows or cracks, and should provide some contrast.

here's a great tutorial on lighting:
http://www.hourences.com/book/booklighting.htm

just rooms no build in, no special details, only brushes as walls.

and about the door, its supposed to be a hidden door so i kinda need it to be a brush entity

that odd shadow line is tipically cause by the 1024 gridline in hammer. if you where to move that brush (alomg with the whole map) it would dissapear.
or something else is splitting the brush there.

and if you just want that room to look illuminated reguarless of how
than just put those textures your using in there in the rad file with a low setting