Quake3World

hi there everyone,gud 2 be back
I am currently studying 4 my exams so hve very little time for q3 mapping.

Anyway, waht i wanted to ask was that is there a way to add overall lighting to a map...
i mean that ive just made 20% of my planned map( its a space ctf map, till now i only managed to make a single base) but cant light it properly like other space maps.
ive added like 14 lights(intensity 200) in that base.but i still find certain regions in my map 2 b dark. also the size of the map has already become 2mb

i want my map to b lighted like q3dm17(in which very few light entities r used )how can i do that

You can do that via the worldspawn entity. It's entity #1, you can get it by using radiant's entitiy search function.

Then hit 'n' to bring up the entity inspector and read the descriptions of possible keys and values. The key may simply be named 'light', but I'm not sure.

Note that this will give you a flat and ugly lighting without shadows, nothing you'll want to keep for the final release.

From the top of my head:
key: ambient
value: 20-30

Washes the map out with a constant light, instead use:

key: _minlight
value: play with different values.

I might not be correct on how minlight is written, so check in the entity window (n) for the worldspawn entity

Ambient basically takes your current light levels and scales everything up, adding your set value to your lightmaps. It generally looks like crap.

_minlight is smarter but still not exactly ideal. It creates a minimum light value, so it brings all the lowest lighted areas up to your set value leaving everything else at its unmodulated intensity.

Even better, you can play around with the -gamma and -compensate compile switches. -gamma 2 and -compensate 4 are usually good places to start. It also takes decimal values so tweak accordingly.

That said, theres no real reason why you can't put in more point lights or point lights with greater intensity other than increased compile time. Light entities are removed during compiles and lightmaps are generated. As long as surface area is constant and you aren't changing the lightmap resolution, your file size shouldn't be affected.

BTW, do you actually have a sky light? Most maps are lit by shader (sky and surface) lights and point lights are used as fill lights.

Finally, also make sure you use -bounce to enable radiosity which should bring up the overall ambient levels.

Ambient basically takes your current light levels and scales everything up, adding your set value to your lightmaps. It generally looks like crap.

so if i just added numerous point lights instead of ambient, gamma and all that,
will it serve the purpose?

Yeah. Normally you want to start with a global sun light, either in a shader or a targeted point light flagged as an entity sun.

Then add a bunch of point lights to get lighting to look more or less correct.

Then compile with -bounce (3-8) and use -gamma and -compensate to fine tune.

With just sun light you can also try -light -notrace -dirty -dirtscale 2 as such, to skip the time-comsuming set up of light.

Thanx fellas, u helped a lot!

Oh yeah. just one last question:
How can i make light beams like the ones present beneath the bfg platform in q3tourney6(the very end of you) map?

look in sfx texture directory for textures/sfx/beam; there are a few others too.

use common/nodraw on the other brush sides you dont want to have the beam on.

MANPREETk wrote:Thanx fellas, u helped a lot!

Oh yeah. just one last question:
How can i make light beams like the ones present beneath the bfg platform in q3tourney6(the very end of you) map?

yeah what $NulL said, Tutorial here