Oblivion CS Lights

[7vincent7black7]

I thought I'd learn to use the construction set and have fun with it until skyrim was released, so I'm doing these tutorials and am one centimeter from finishing chapter three except for an issue I ignored until now. I don't know how to use lights, and they didnt get indepth with it except with a passing comment or two. I'm looking at these lights, and half of them are fake, the other half are off with no sign of how to turn them on, and they few that do give light are small little candles that wouldnt be bigger than my hand in real life. Am I going to have to place a candelabra then go to static fire and place the smallest flame they have for each candle on the candleabra or something?

[jamochawoke]

The way lights are handled in Oblivion is VERY memory intensive. That is why most of the static objects for lights are actually fake or off.

 

Usually how Vanilla does it is to have a room, add the "lights" and maybe a few meshes that do give off light, and then place a few of the ambient lights (sometimes with flicker, sometimes not depending on the situation and the light sources) around the room in strategic locations.

 

If every light you placed actually emitted light Oblivion would very likely crash.

[7vincent7black7]

So I place lights into the building, where do I find the meshes or whatever that do give off light? I read in one article someone wrote giving tips about balanced light to place fake ones and then put lightbulbs in strategically to balance the light and I'm like, " lightbulbes....???"

[David Brasher]

To change lights from "fake" or "off" to "on," use the Edit > Search and Replace function. Select the light you want to change and use the function. All the lights have names that are very much the same. So if you don't like having CandleFat01Fake in a certain spot run Search and Replace and you will see the whole list of lights with names like:

 

CandleFat01Off

CandleFat01Blue128

CandleFat01Orange128

CandleFat01Red128

CandleFat01Yellow64

CandleFat01Yellow216

 

Pick the one you like. "Fake" has an animated flame but gives off no light. "Off" is not lit. The Color in the name is the color of light. The number is the size of circle the light source lights up. Some of the lights will have "flicker" or "pulse" in their name.

 

Beware of intersecting light radii. For optimum performance, never have two real lights lighting up the same area and having their circles overlap. This is a huge cause of lag in Oblivion and can even crash the game on a weak computer.

[David Brasher]

Lightbulbs are those gray symbols you see in the CS. They give off light, but have no source such as a fire or candle. They have been described as "Hollywood Lighting." They are rather fake, but very important in a game that is so badly optimized as Oblivion. You can use them to make things like windows, cave entrances, mushrooms, crystals, and magical items glow. you can also use them with fake lights to get exactly the light radius or color you want.

[7vincent7black7]

Okay, thanks for the help guys, I just today had my first northmarker issue and had to search and replace for it with a night mother statue, so I now know how to do that. I'll try to find those lightbulbs on cs and use fake lights with them for bedroom areas and maybe multicolored ones for others. My keyboard just died so I got to go log off or something until I can get batteries or a wired keyboard this afternoon. These older batteries could go out any second. Peace XD.

[7vincent7black7]

Allright, i just have one last issue is, where can I find those lightbulb icons in the object list? I'm trying to find them to put them into a wall behind these massively minimized chapel glass windows to bring out their colors and features as they're kinda in darkness right now.

 

 

My link

I'm adding a link to my version of a screenshot that will show the wall of the glass windows as decoration. I'm making a fake musuem for the tutorial instead of a house but as you can see across the front side of the house (far right of image) is the two square openings through the second floor. On the first floor under these areas are two separate pedestals with lots of mini statues for looking at on them. One on the left of image has all the saints and akatosh with akatosh in the center encircled by the others, the right side one has all the deadric statues that are 1/16 thier size or something like that. The point of this is there are two hanging lamps, one for each opening hangning from the ceiling that shine down on these areas, and the fountain in the center, which you can barely see has a candle inside of the top bud of this huge flower that alows a balanced light flow over the fountain and across the window, the only thing is those windows are kinda in the dark and you wont be able to see them much (the windows that are the chapel winds that you CAN see in this image). So I wanted to use one lightbulb around the number of 215 right in the middle of the akatosh chapel window in the center to not break into the other light radii but balance it out more for a full warm effect sorta.

Edited October 14, 2011 by 7vincent7black7

[Striker879]

If you click on the category Light in the Object window left side (and click the top level, not one of the subcategories such as Dungeons) you can scroll down to a group of lights stating with 'Common' (e.g. CommonBrightOrange400). There are different colour and radius light sources. Position them to give the appearance that the fake lights are doing the job (found under Static\Furniture\Lights).

[7vincent7black7]

So just go to the object list and click on Light the actual primary directory thing? allright, I was looking at Light\lights before, Just after I posted this thread yesterday and got replys I found there was two places where lights were placed, static\lights, and light\lights.

 

Update: nevermind about one thing, those windows are absolutely lovely in game. They might seem alittlbe out of place on a brickwall in the middle of a room, but they're supposed to be suppossedly hung up on the wall to look at, the lights I used up to this point are real working lights and seem to be doing find and not slowing down my building on framerate or anything so I think its safe to say I'll be doing fine from here on. I'll keep this page favorited for its information but now that I know where to find working candeliers, some different lightbubls thanks to the last poster, and some fake lights to go with the lightbulbs, I think this topic can now be closed and archived.

Edited October 14, 2011 by 7vincent7black7

[jamochawoke]

If you have a very small interior cell (such as a hallway) using nothing but actual light emitting meshes won't hurt the game. It's when you get to bigger places like say an Imperial City district cell or a dungeon cell with lots of candles or something that you need to start using ambient lights or your computer will choke on all that lighting information.