Ambient Light

[Lenard]

I know nothing about radiant so this is difficult for me. I just don't know the interface very well I guess. How do you set ambient light levels and what are the disadvantages like that it talks about in the manual? Is there any way of overcomming these disadvantages?

The reason I ask is that my brother has decided he is going to make a q3 level intirely in Lightwave and light it really really well then bake the textures and re-assemble it in radiant. We just want to see if we can do it because this would pretty much achieve the best looking lighting ever in radiant minus volumetrics, if I am not missing anything.

[StormShadow]

key: ambient
value: whatever you want

if you have the value set too high, there is very little contrast in your map, and it tends to look washed out. I wouldnt ever set ambient light higher than 10 or so.

[Pext]

oh... i allways thought ambient was a normalized value.

[Lenard]

Ok, you see, my problem is I just don't know how to set it. Where do I put in the value?

[StormShadow]

hit 'n' to bring up the entities window

then type ambient into the empty field next to the 'key', hit enter then type '10' or whatever you want in the field next to the value

[obsidian]

Select any non-entity brush (normal brush not attached to an entity) and then...

hit 'n' to bring up the entities window

then type ambient into the empty field next to the 'key', hit enter then type '10' or whatever you want in the field next to the value

[obsidian]

Alternatives to using ambient light (which in general, looks crappy... so use these alternatives):

_minlight
Also a worldspawn entity key/value pair. Instead of scaling all lightmap values, this just specifies a minimum ambient light level - so it only scales lightmap values below the _minlight setting. IOW, it sets a lower boundary of how dark your lightmaps will be.

-gamma N.N
Compiler switch... sets lightmap/vertex gamma value for more realistic lighting, instead of using high ambient/minlight. Default is 1.0 (linear ramp), good values are between 1.5 and 2.2

-compensate N.N
Compiler switch... (default 1.0) for descaling lightmap/vertex/grid data to compensate for ingame overbrighting. 4.0 is a good value for Quake 3 if used in combination with -gamma 2.2

[Lenard]

Thanks guys. I will let you know if there is any product produced from this.