Lighting

Immersion and Theme

My goal with the lighting was to create light fixtures that fit the map's theme of "chateau". For that, I used a lot of torches on large hanging light fixtures as well as wall mounted fixtures and filling in areas that were left too dark with point lights.

Guidance and Orientation

Lighting was also used to help show the player were they can go. Lights were placed strategically to point things out to players: doorways are well lit, the spiral staircases, the rocket launcher on the throne, etc.

Troubleshooting

I found that this map takes one hour or more to compile when VIS and Light are enabled. This made it hard to test the lighting as I was adding it in and editing it. To try to work around this, I would do a pass through on the map adding in lighting for the whole level and then compile to see how that turned out.

Pass 1

After this first pass through on lighting, I found that the level was too dark. Some spaces were too dark to see and the throne room was just too dark over all. A lot of detail and texturing was lost in the shadows.

Throne Room Chapel Dining Room Hallway Between the Storage Room and the Gallery Looking in the Throne Room

Pass 2

In this pass, I went through an added point lights in the areas that were left too dark after the first part. The focus of this pass was making sure the level was well lit. Once I test to see that the level is well lit, I'll do another pass to make the lighting more dramatic

• Area lights were added in the throne to lighten up that area.
• Fill lights at half brightness were added in corners and in the dark spots underneath wall mounted lights.
• After compiling this second pass on the lighting, the lighting did not showing up since -fast was checked in the light tab in the compiler and the console didn't understand this element so it didn't render the light at all. It looked like the captures showcased on the Texturing PageThis unlighted level was what was tested in during the playtest.