Bad Lighting?

#1 Looks like you need to compensate for the added lighting kit in Torque 1.5. Do this by setting your ambient light value to 1/2 what it was and maybe your light value as well. There's a Torque article on it somewhere on the website. I'll link it if I find it.

#2 This post isn't really help, but that is a nice house interior. I'd live there if it had plumbing and electricity (and internet).

#3 @Joe, do you mean adjust my light values in Torque or in QuArK? Thanks!

@Maxwell, thanks! Any compliment is welcome!

Tony

#4 He means torque and hi again by the way nice house simple but good! tge 1.5 comes with the lighting kit sun ambient settings and so on and you can desable the light on the terrain with 1 pref pref::somelighting i dont remember::onterrain = false.

#5 I still need help with ambient lighting.

This article doesn't help
tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/Torque/LightingSystem/Ambient_and_Zone_Lighting



and this one tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/Torque/LightingSystem just directed meback to the first.

Can anyone explain how to adjust ambient lighting? I just need it adjusted for this one building because the others look fine. I still don't understand why.

Quote:
The ambient contribution of a light is set using the Ambient fader in the Light Editor

But I don't even have a light on this building, just default sunlight. Why would one building be brighter than the one next to it?

Thanks!

Tony

@Maxwell, here's a link to the thatch cottage dif file, free to anyone who wants it.
www.geocities.com/infinitum3d/thatch_cottage.zip

#6 I had the same problem when I upgraded. Open up Torque, under World Editor Inspector, click on "sun" not "FXSun" if you added one. Scroll Down to were it says "ambient" and click the button by it. Just lower it down into the grey, hit apply, and make sure you relight your scene.

Oh yea, you can make some really neat night time fx by lowering ambient and color together.

#7 Cool. Thanks Caleb, but ambient changes didn't help.

#8

I've changed the ambient settings, but no help. I still don't know why my cottage looks so much brighter than the demo cottage.

I thought maybe I did something wrong in QuArK, but I went back and made a new cottage from scratch. Still too bright. I'm not using ANY light entities in QuArK, so the Torque lighting should be all that shines...

Please help!

Tony

#9 You're not using the same textures. The textures from Tim's interior packs are color and intensity balanced, so they look even in the game - this allows the lighting to add a lot of the contrast detail.

The textures you're using (especially thatch.jpg) have a higher intensity.

#10 Not exactly. I even tried the textures from RealmWars (BWOOD and granite).


It still looks brighter than the default cottage. When I load Realm Wars, the buildings look fine. Not too bright.

If it's not the textures, is it QuArK? If it absolutely IS the textures, then what are the stats (hue Value RGB lightness etc.) that I should use?

Thanks!!!

Tony

#11 When creating textures you need to make them look a lot darker in photoshop or gimp than what you want to look like in Torque.

I usually get the texture looking right in photoshop and then adjust the curves - changing the light end from 0 to about 10 or 15.
(so that what was white - 0 is now light grey - 10)

#12 Try using the same exterior textures as the cottage (oak2, castlestone1a, ik_brick_12864a, IK_WOODV256A).

If that doesn't seem to help try running Torque in light mapped debug mode to see if the lighting looks the same on both interiors - in case something weird is going on between Quark and Torque. To do this make sure you're using a debug build of Torque, then load up a mission, and in the console type:

setInteriorRenderMode(5);

This shows the light maps without the increased exposure or blended textures (if you've never used interior debug modes before check out interiorDebug.cc line 75 - it shows all of the modes, lots of goodies in there :). If the lighting looks off in this mode there's definitely something odd going on.


Honestly there's no single right way when balancing your textures, it's based more on what looks good and not on exact values - the trick is getting them all around the same relative intensity. Ideally the textures should look like the materials they represent would side-by-side in a bright white ambiently lit room (like a conference hall) - with the exception that you might have some baked-in shading on the textures.

#13 If i test this in TGE 1.5 its works like any interior so i cant see anything
strange, its only the textures, they have no structure and are bright.
So do like John says test with the oak and brick textures.

#14 Thanks. It must be my textures. I've used the default textures, and they seem to work fine, so I'll keep trying.

edit: I've darkened the thatch texture (and others) and they look much better. I guess the sun is just really bright :)

Thanks again!!!

Tony

#15 It is your lighting in Torque. Look at the ground, its way to bright. After making the ambient more into the grey, did you relight your scene (alt+L)?

Its not your models, try looking at your character, if he is really bright then Torque Lighting it is.

#16 Yes I did, it's still too bright. Any more ideas?

#17 Set the sun's color and ambient to (0, 0, 0) and relight - did it affect the scene? If not check your integration. If it did try experimenting with these values until you get the lighting you want.

#18
Big Difference!!!

Thanks!!!


Tony

#19 OK, now I've over-compensated. Everything is too dark. The two pictures above use ambient light settings of 0 (too dark) or 0.5 (too bright). Is it just me, or am I still missing something. I don't have torque running at the moment so I can't try 0.1, 0.2, etc., but is that my best option? Torque supports decimals to three places (I think) so I guess I could try 0.001, 0.002 etc., and just keep going until something works for me. And apparently I'm the only one having this problem, so I'm sure it's not a bug in Torque. It's got to be something I'm doing wrong.

Thanks to all who've tried to help! I've learned alot from this.

Tony

#20 You also need to change the COLOR of the sun. Set the sun color to something like 0.6 0.6 0.6 and change Ambient to 0.3 0.3 0.3

Now relight the scene. You should see more what you would expect.