esselfortium
Cumulonimbus Antagonistic Posting
Posts: 6021
Registered: 01-02 |
Nice.
In port maps I've at times resorted to some pretty heavy-duty hackery with floor/ceiling portals to do the type of large-scale smooth lighting you're describing. Particularly in complex areas where slopes are used, it comes in very handy since you can't usually get away with those sorts of sector splits.
I admit I've often settled for smaller or less intensive lighting in more structurally complex areas.
In some situations like that, especially in vanilla mapping where limits typically restrict the complexity of the lighting, I'll have a series of lights affect a single large area together, with some appropriate gradienting or other adequate transition to that (sharp directional shadowing can work wonders when a seg/visplane budget is involved), rather than fading to darkness around each of them.
It's odd how as maps have become more detailed, we've often ended up with all sorts of gradiented lights affecting the floor and ceiling, but the surrounding walls being left completely uniformly lit to the dim surrounding level, unless there happens to be a directional wall light pointed directly at them in a small area.
One technique I like using to alleviate this, both because it's easier than the billions of sector splits required for large floor gradients and actually can have more of a visual impact, is doing wall lighting gradients. In UDMF you can do this directly with per-sidedef lighting, and in Boom you can do it by attaching narrow sectors to your walls and then light-transferring their floors and ceilings to the surrounding room level to hide the trick. If used well it can add a surprising amount of depth and atmosphere to a scene, even if there's only very basic sector gradienting used on the floors in the area.
Some old before/after shots for wall gradienting in a TSoZD scene: [Before] [After]
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01-08-13 09:26 
![[Before]](http://i.imgur.com/PrOXp.png){kind=link}
![[After]](http://i.imgur.com/W5tju.png){kind=link}