Sunlight

Sunlight Options
Sky Lighting
    _sky_ambient, _sun_ambient
    _sky_surface, _sun_surface
Directional Sunlight

Related Topics


Sunlight Options

ArghRad adds a number of options to produce much more realistic lighting from sky surfaces. In addition to the normal surface light, "Suns" can be defined which cast light only at a specific angle.

Sunlight will only be cast from light-emitting sky surfaces. That means the surfaces must be flagged as SKY, LIGHT, and have a non-zero light value (the actual numerical value is ignored by everything except _sky_surface).

Note: avoid putting coplanar sky & non-sky surfaces right up against each other. It's unrealistic construction, and may cause some spots to be improperly lit. It's no problem if they're on different planes, or there is another brush between them.

Sky Lighting

These sky-light settings are defined in the map's worldspawn. They deal with normal sky surface lighting, not directional sunlight. However, they can be affected by the directional suns' color & brightness.


 
 
_sky_ambient  brightness
_sky_ambient  red green blue
_sun_ambient  brightness
_sun_ambient  red green blue

location: worldspawn    version: 1.00  
brightness: 0-255
red green blue: 0-255 each
default: 0
default: 0 0 0

These set the brightness of the ambient sunlight. This is added to all points that can see any light-emitting sky surface. Dim values tend to look best (bright values cause harsh, unrealistic shadows). The value can take one of two forms:

brightness - A single ambient brightness level. The color of the light is derived from the colors of all active suns, or the texture color if no suns are enabled.

red green blue - Three separate brightness values for red, green, and blue ambient lighting (not a standard RGB color).

no example image example map
 

 
 
_sky_surface  brightness
_sky_surface  red green blue
_sun_surface  brightness
_sun_surface  red green blue

location: worldspawn    version: 2.00  
brightness: > 0 (1 is special)
red green blue: > 0 each (0-1 is special)
default: 0
default: 0 0 0

These set the brightness of the normal sky surface light. This allows both normal surface light and sunlight to shine from the same surfaces (this tends to look better than _sky_ambient). The value can take one of two forms:

brightness - A single brightness level. The color of the light is derived from the colors of all active suns, or the texture color if no suns are enabled. A value of 1 is special: it makes ArghRad use the surface's own light value.

red green blue - Three separate brightness values for red, green, and blue lighting (normally not a standard RGB color). If all three values are 1 or less it has special meaning: it is treated like an RGB color, and the surface's own light value is used.

no example image example map
 

Directional Sunlight

All other sunlight settings deal with directional sunlight. ArghRad supports up to 9 suns, each with its own unique properties (all are disabled by default). An individual sun is enabled when any one of its settings (except diffade/difwait) is specified. Suns are defined in one of two ways:

Light Entity Suns
Worldspawn Suns


Related Topics

-chopsky