Morrigan - I like her face, reallly I do

[knobbly]

I've looked through every Morrigan face mod I could find and while many of them look excellent in their own right none of them do what I'd like to see. It's a very simple change really. I don't want her to look different, I like her face exactly as it is, with one exception. That awful black shadow below her nose that looks like a miniature mustache. Is there anything like that out there? Because I'm rather fond of Morrigans appearance, I don't want her to look different. I just want to remove the one thing that makes her look slightly ridiculous.

[LancelotLoire]

Would you have me lasso the sun and move it to a more appealing position? It's a shadow cast from the tip of her nose and you would literally have to mod every single locations lighting source to shine from a different direction to fix it.

[knobbly]

Really? The shadow stretches when she moves her lips so I thought it was just an attempt to paint shadow by means of a texture, not something that actually took light sources into account.

[LancelotLoire]

Well I'm going to go a bit technical and mind you I might have forgotten a term or two sense it's been quite a while since I last did any modeling/animating. For in outside setting they use an "Ambient Lighting" to make things appear when not in direct "sun light" so to speak. Which of course is normal in real world aspects, you can see things in the shade. The "sun light" is actually a point directional fixed lighting source placed high in the "sky" above the field of landscape and actors to give the game an appearance of having an actual sun. Now to modify this you would either have to change two things really. First you would either need to increase the ambient lighting to lessen the shadow cast or to move your fixed lighting to a different angle. This would be required to be done in every single loadable map to make the shadow disappear below her nose (Lothering, Redcliff, Denerim, Orzamar, Deep Roads, Thaigs, Buildings...) This will of course cause a vast side effect in that it would drastically change the look of the world making it look less realistic because of the lack of shadows.

 

Now I don't really remember if this is true or not, but in a lot of games you have the ability to shut off shadows or drop them very low from within the Video Options Settings. That could feasibly help you a bit.

 

Great now I'm thinking about lights so I'll nerd out for a little bit...

 

The biggest problem that games have with trying to attempt a "real world" sun is that I don't believe any computers around can physically handle that great of distance in just one scene. Our sun is roughly 93 million miles away so that it's light is actually able to cast shadows that are relevant in the triangular shapes (immensely small fractions of differences in the angles here do to the insanely huge distances involved). The triangular shape I will explain fully in just a sec. With an animation there is always a slight difference in shadow sizes as compared to shapes. The triangular part of this to locate the direction of the lighting source is to take 2 objects that are both in a line. One several feet ahead of the other. If they are the exact same size albeit are 10 feet apart and lined up with the directional light, the one that is in the front will have a longer shadow then the one behind it.

 

So as an example we will assume that both Figures are 6 feet tall. Figure A which in front has a 9 foot shadow, Figure B which is behind has a 7 foot shadow. It's been a long while since I've done this math but the shape of the figures and their shadows are a 90 degree angle which an imaginary line between the tip top of the Figure and the farthest spot of their shadow equaling 90 degrees onto this. Now to find out the distance of a light source from this, you start drawing a line from the very tip of the shadow making sure it passes against the tip of the top of a figure for bother figure/shadows until the reach a point that those lines meet each other. This will of course tell you the distance of the light source and the figures. In still images this is very easy to manipulate out by having 2 identical pictures, one with shadow and one that has no objects on it. The farther the light source can get away from the "figures" the better. Since that will greatly lessen the visible differences.

 

Now the most impressive lighting animation for games nowadays takes place in huge open world games in which times of day/night will slowly flop back and forth. These are also a lot easier to mod for funner cases. A mod for Oblivion off this very sight will pretty much all but remove the Ambient light making the games nights nearly pitch black. I'll tell ya what, if you play Oblivion I highly recommend that mod (I can't remember the name but it's in the same series as better environments).

 

Now for smaller sources of light they use another fun little setting. Fires or lanterns are given a far less strength in brightness that will actually dissipate after a short distance. Combined with the ability for the light to be slightly obscured by smoke hugely tosses onto games realness.

 

For a final little element.. I think games need to include more intensely fogged events at some points. The swirling cloud of "smoke" with an erie ghostly light caused by reflection of the fog make far "scary" scenes.