LE Tutorial for Lighting?

[Arkadaemus]

Trying to get more into proper lighting for my interiors to set the mood (and not look just plain/bland). I've read through the CK wiki lighting tutorial, and didn't really come away with anything that helped.

 

When I place a light source on say a candle, when rotating around the room, the light model will sometimes turn red. And this is visible in game as I see the light across the room, it's dim. When I get close enough, the light snaps on bright like a switch.

 

Basically I just don't understand the data and placement. Moving the light models around, up and down, find/replace for others just isn't working out. Any help or where I can look for reading material?

[Tamira]

http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/topic/6843-ck-basics-lesson-4/

[Di0nysys]

The game can render 3/4 simultaneous shadow lights within view, and up to 8/9 non-shadow casters. The engine culls(derenders) anything outside the player's view; ie when you look away, objects are derendered. Using portals/roombounds allows you to increase that number since it despawns objects according to how you cut up your interior.

When lighting an interior, always use less lights to achieve the atmosphere you want.
As an example, the way i lit this one boss room is by creating a grating in the roof, and using a sun shadow caster expanding it just enough to flood the room with shadows. You can also increase the intensity (not to be confused with scale) by holding CTRL + ALT + S.

 

To light the scene, it's less intensive to have one or 2 shadow casters used more effectively than having 4 or 5 lights, and using particle effects, i can amplify the effect of the light by way of external emmitance. IE, place a smoke FX under Moveable statics, drag it into the render window next to the light source or below it, then while having it selected, press INSERT to bring up the batch process window. There, under External Emmitance, select your shadow light, and then click DO. This changes the color of the FX to reflect the lighting.

http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/29/28430/NetherLegion.jpg

Next, you always gotta mess around with Imagespace setups for ur cells, and editing the lighting template within your cell. I recommend you lookup some tutorials by Darkfox127 on Youtube on how to do all these things. Don't have the time to explain, but the benefits on atmosphere from using ur own Imagespaces/Lighting Templates are huge. Just as a rule for interior lighting template setups, decrease the ambient levels always to increase contrast in your scenes and make them "pop" more. Hope this helps.

[Arkadaemus]

Thanks, I'll try messing with the image space and effects more. Here are two examples of what I was referring to:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just taking one step in or out drastically changes the lights in some cases. I'll see what I can do with some practice and post back here.

[Di0nysys]

That's lights getting turned off because u got too many lights in the scene. U gotta setup portals / remove lights.

[Arkadaemus]

That's lights getting turned off because u got too many lights in the scene. U gotta setup portals / remove lights.

 

Indeed. I have 3 rooms in the house, one upstairs, two down. That main room in picture had a firelight, 2 candle lights, and one light from the other room apparently bleeding thru the doorway.

 

So I took out all the candle lights, used one fireplace light, and changed the image space. Went thru about half of them before deciding on this:

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for the tips. I'll keep working on it :)

[Di0nysys]

 

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Nice dude. That looks very warm and cozy.