Basic Lighting

[Steve Schmidt]

what do you do for lighting? well most maps contain a light_environment entity, and this is basically your "sun" it will light up your map in the most realistic style possible, there are 3 options in light_env:

Pitch Yaw Roll ( y z x )
Pitch
Brightness

Now at the right top of your window there is a black circle with a white line in it, this is the pitch yaw roll, you can set what angle you want your "sun" to come from, I often set mine to 270. Play around with the setting on a test map to see what effects you can create.

For the pitch, I often use -45, everyone has there recommendations, but play around with it and see what you get.

Brightness is the general colour of the light, by default its a horrid yellow, which doesn't look too good in maps, it looks, well yellow, if you want a daylight map choose the lightish grey colour, and it will be more realistic, if you choose orange for instance, the shadows on your map will have an orangy step effect on, which doesn't look nice, you may have to play around with your compiling on rad, to use exotic colours.

Now thats all light_environment, there are various other light entities to, another important one being "light" this is just your basic light, you can angle this as well, and change its brightness and have various effects like flickering, To choose a custom effect, select appearance and choose an effect. Lighting is an important element on maps, and you should be aware of how much of an area one light covers, you dont want thousands of lights next to each other, when one could light it all up nicely for you.

Light_spot is another entity for lighting, working in much the same way as a light, you can have inner and outer angles, which is the brightness and fading angles, it really is best to do a small room, and try some options and keep testing away to see what looks and feels good.

[Jonathan]

what if i want to make a night map, which skyname do you recomend, any other tips to make a good night map

[Slackiller]

list of names for cs http://www.vlatitude.com/resources/cs_sky.php
pick a dark one.
hl1 skynames http://www.vlatitude.com/resources/hl_sky.php
make sure to put the sky files into your cstrike/gfx/env folder
lots of sky maps and textures found on wadfather site http://www.planethalflife.com/wadfather/

http://www.vlatitude.com/tutorials.php?tutID=8

make your light entity's low in brightness. change the last set of number to a low number and test the map.

[Jonathan]

my grass is to green, how do i make it so that it has a dark, night effect, the links work but i have to register, do you have any others???

[Slackiller]

u can google for some others, or just register 

[Kurt Schultz]

try adjusting the btirghtness and the abbeince levels of your lights. it will show you foour numbers in them, like this:

255 6 0 0 that last number is the control for the lumintisity. the first three are you spectrum selection, they let you choose from 16 million colors be selecting what ever you want in the RGB values.

[Jonathan]

how do lights really work??with or with out them i see no difference, , maybe you can post some pictures of different lights can you help me with this? i have grass as floor(the standard one) and space as sky, the problem is the grass is to bright and it doesnt seem to be night

[Kurt Schultz]

you gota play with what i just posted. make that last value low in the brigtness and in ambient on the enity light_envrionmental

[Slackiller]

if lighting is not changing you probally got errors. post the log in mapping help forum.

[MisFit4Me]

what if i want to make a night map, which skyname do you recomend, any other tips to make a good night map

Don't know if anyone's said this yet, but under flags, check initially dark.

[Ouch]

Is it possible to add light to a map already compiled.? I understand how to use ripent and have made many map modifications but have yet to figure out how to add light without having to recompile the entire map.? BTW, Slackiller is a GOD

Ouch
www.navycs.com

[Slackiller]

Is it possible to add light to a map already compiled.

I doubt it very much.

vis and rad would have to run again, to make calculations to the map surfaces. they are the 2 longer parts of the compiling procedure.

  thanks for your comment 

[Ouch]

I have a map I made that is actually loved by many.  I find it too dark in some areas.  Problem is the last time i compiled it my hard drive crashed and I lost everything.  http://navycs.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core:ShowItem&g2_itemId=536 is a zip of the map, what is the best way to get an editable version back?    fy_ouchworld3, fun from all angles.

[Slackiller]

you could decompile using winbsp, but first try the Darkulator tool in map tool section http://csm2.net/mapping_tools.php

[walnut]

Something's wrong. My map is always brightly lit, for some reason. I haven't put any lights in, but when I play the whole room is really really bright. Adding lights doesn't seem to affect the map in any way. WTF?