If I recall correctly, was there not a method to use #light nodes/markers in the BSP and have it emit light? I cannot figure out how to do it, and light fixtures and scenery are crap.

i dont know the markers way, but instead use render only geometrys inside the srtructure and apply light materials. Cīmon, its in the hek guide. Besides i prefer light fixtures, it prevents me more modeling work

Would have been nice to know this a year ago, thank you. Question, what do you mean by "use render only gemoetrys inside the structure and apply light materials"

is that sarcasm? ok if it inst make a plane or sometihng, attach it to mesh and when you apply a material use the "!" sign, so it wont have collision and it will be more easy to manipulate.

wait, let me search a viedo

same problem...

I have never heard of using planes with !whatever to produce light with textures. That makes no sense to me. I am not being sarcastic, that makes literally no sense. Why not just apply the textures on the map normally, and change the radiosity properties in the shaders?

forget it, i didnt found it, in your place i would use light fixtures

Edit: Open your shaders in guerilla, in the first part "radiosity properties" theres a section named power, whatever your interior shaders are put 10-20, whtaever value you whant, save it, then run radiosity thats it.
Edited by EmmanuelCD on May 28, 2015 at 08:45 PM

That's what I have finally done, now I have one problem. It has nothing to do with lighting. I've created a fairly simple map, it has taken me about 4 hours to do this due to lighting and textures issues. about 1.5 hours were spent on modeling and fixing errors texturing etc.



So how do I improve? How do I get better? I've watched hours upon hours of tutorials, but that doesn't seem to help massively, it gives me a few techniques sure, but I can never decide what I want my map to be like, and not only that, cliffs and or walls are one of my issues, I have no idea how to make them look good, its always straight walls. Any tips?
Edited by S12Spark on May 28, 2015 at 08:52 PM

you could, alternatively, make the lightmaps in 3DS max and use aether to put it in CE

I may be mistaken but if you don't want to add +sky materials into your indoor map.

Simply create a primitive box which incase your indoor bsp. Flip all the normals so the faces are pointing inside rather than out and then apply a your +sky shader material to that box.

Link both the sky box and your bsp to the frame and export.

(Please note you can edit lighting by painting colors in sapien, whilst not 100% accurate it is a decent technique to patch dodgy errors and so on.)

How DO you light an indoor map using markers anyways . ?

To be quite honest, I THINK bigass might have done it, I'm not sure. I could be wrong, but when I converted the BSP I do remember something about #lights in markers. I think.

I could be remembering something from 2009 also when I was attempting to make a piece of scenery with illumination. I have no clue.

DEAR GOD DO NOT USE THE RADIOSITY PROPERTIES IN SHADERS UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.

Seriously, guys. Rendering lightmaps with many of lit shaders takes forever. Use light fixtures, or sceneries\devices with non-dynamic light attached to them (basically, create a new scenery and attach a light to it in the "attachments" section. Then, make sure that the "dynamic" flag in the light attached is not checked, and set the radious\shape\settings\lens flares of your light).
Then, open your scenario in Sapien and type "radiosity_quality 1" and then type "radiosity_start". When it's over, type "radiosity_save" and you're good to go.
Seriously, guys, devices lightsy work just as good as shaders light, but seemingly take a tenth of the time to render.

Anyway, if you really want to get through this (there is really no reason to, though) go to levels\a10\shaders and take a look at the various shaders used (such as "light", "halogen on" and so on) to see how should you set it to work. There are some in c10 as well, among the various shader transparent chicago (basically, developers created planes to which they gave this shader, invisible, with a very low light power to create low illumination for dark exteriors).


SOURCE: me; when trying to light a50_A with the default settings, it took an afternoon. When I took away the lit shaders and changed them with light devices, along with a couple of other tweaks, it took a quarter of hour. A QUARTER OF HOUR.
Edited by rododoonceagain on May 29, 2015 at 04:51 PM

Most of Halo 1 was lit with radiosity shader properties, supplemented by light fixtures when needed (such as the Forerunner sconces or the Covenant ceiling lights in a50). The more faces emitting light, of course the longer it will take, which is why interior bsps with a lot of shader lights will take ages to run a full radiosity. If you want to run a draft pass just type "radiosity_quality 0", and that should decrease the radiosity time. For a "final" quality radiosity pass you can use "radiosity_quality 1" before typing "radiosity_start".

Note: Radiosity 1 takes FOREVER to run. For TSC:E we rarely if ever ran radiosity 1 passes, only when we knew we needed it to look good for a test or for final lightmap uvs for Aether/dlm work.

I can't say why the light devices took less time to run radiosity, but probably because you removed many many more shader faces than you added devices to relight the level.

Aether is certainly an option, but that's some fairly advanced stuff for someone just starting out.

S12Spark, I would definitely look at the materials section and the tutorial in the hektutorial file included with the HEK installation. It might not cover everything but it definitely goes over how to light a map, at least in the basic sense.



The ! is to tell the game not to consider the light surface as having collision. Otherwise any floating light planes would receive errors in tool, since they are not sealed. You can in theory have a collision material that gives off light, but you would have to make sure all the edges were sealed, so it couldn't be a typical floating light.
Edited by slashrat on May 29, 2015 at 07:15 PM

this is what i was trying to explain, to bad im to slow to think and write

It doesn't take that long to render radiosity in tool, however it isn't the best quality even with 1 in tool, so it's better to do it in sapien for a final run. It isn't that bad, besides, who wants to have lights all over there map that make it look awful? Unless there is a way to make the lights completely invisible, which I do not know of.

Sapien and tool should have the exact same result from a radiosity 1, but certainly tool is a fickle program, and it's possible it could look slightly different. I believe tool runs it faster however.

If you want an invisible light you just use a transparent one pixel bitmap and have the shader still emit light in the radiosity settings. Bungie has quite a few invisible lights in their levels, a lot of the lighting is faked using hovering planes to simulate more accurate detail. The "shafted" cutscene in the original Silent Cartographer is one example: There is an invisible blue light plane above the platform, since otherwise that would be totally dark.

What about the model for the light? just a plane? then I can make it into a lighting device?

Here is how the HEK tutorial does plane lights; most advanced Forerunner lighting is merely complex versions of the same concept, render-only planes floating a little above (or below) the geometry.

How would one run full radiosity of a map within tool?

And apart from 0 0.9 is there an even faster stop thresh hold value which yields acceptable results.

Tool's lightmap command is:

tool.exe lightmaps <scenario> <bsp index> <quality> <stop threshold>

An example could be:

tool.exe lightmaps levels\test\mapname 1 0 0.1

You can tell tool to stop running lightmaps at values higher than 0.9, but it depends on the map. A map with only one light might start at something like 0.5, so a value of 0.9 might make it not do much at all. However a map with a lot of lights might take a while to reach 0.9, so you could tell it to stop at a higher number, like 1 or 1.5. See what the first number is that appears when you start a full quality_0 pass, and use that as your starting number. I suggest using something a little bit lower than the starting number just to be safe and make sure you get full lightmap uvs, such as picking 0.9 if the starting number is 1.0.
Edited by slashrat on May 31, 2015 at 06:03 PM