http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/guides/lighting-basics/

let me know if you see anything wrong. 

Such a cool article on Q1 lighting, I am glad you wrote that, thank you :) 

 

very useful indeed! 

 

 

thanks! 

Add screenshots and it will be quad bettered. 

nah, too lazy for that. :P
i already had that typed out, i just CnP'd most of it. 

very good reference. I've found I have stopped using -soft though, as it tends to smudge and flatten dramatic shadows too much (like light coming through a barred window), making things feel a little bit too uniform sometimes.

I also make heavy use of low-intensity "filler" lights as a way of creating the illusion of bounce lights - e.g. a bright delay 5 torch in a brush holder would otherwise have nasty black shadows underneath the holder, but it starts to look real nice with 1 (or sometimes as much as 4, depending on the surrounding geo) low intensity, low wait fillers around it.

I've never found a use for minlight yet, not even the local minlight. 

I've found I have stopped using -soft though, as it tends to smudge and flatten dramatic shadows too much (like light coming through a barred window), making things feel a little bit too uniform sometimes.

yes, thank you for reminding me. i find there are times where -soft is detrimental as well. in general, i find it's great for outdoor areas, but ONLY if the sun is not casting long shadows.
if the sun is low in the sky, i feel it looks better without the blurring.
i'll have to add that in, that it's not necessary to always have -soft on.

about filler lights: that's cool, i had no idea other people did that! i like making arrays of lights in spherical shapes, with the lights near the center having about 5 and the ones near the edge having about 1. makes really cool fake volume lights and gives more interesting shadows because they are being accumulated from many different points.
for these, i actually use delay 3 (no attenuation).

maybe i'll write a post about these things later...
i'd be interested in hearing if anyone else has subtle lighting techniques like that. 

anyone else use antilights? I'm using them to do silly things like a sort of fake HDR (haha, it's a bit grandiose calling it that) where I have a bright light outside coming through a barred window to cast dramatic window bar shadows in the gloomy interior room. I set it up with a bright spotlight coming through the window bars, but in order not to have a big bright blob on the outside wall, I cancel it out with antilights on the outside - this gives the illusion that when you are outside, the light source doesn't seem that bright because your eyes are accustomed to it, but from the inside it seems bright outside. 

i never had much luck with them, but i have not really done much testing with them. the few times i've tried using them, i ended up with poor results so i try to avoid them.

how exactly are you cancelling out the spot light... as in, what values are needed? do you guess it and tweak or can you just figuring it out based on the current values? 

how exactly are you cancelling out the spot light... as in, what values are needed? do you guess it and tweak or can you just figuring it out based on the current values?

I should have mentioned - make sure the spotlight uses a different style to the surrounding lights, then you make the antilight use the spotlight style and it will only cancel light of that style (i.e. the spotlight) - this is a mega useful property of antilights.

with it only affecting the spotlight it makes it a lot easier to to just make an educated guess for the antlight values, eyeball it, adjust, eyeball it, adjust...I don't have a formula for this but I've found it doesn't take too many iterations until it's "good enough". 

I stuck the antilight off to the side of the window, so it flooded the wall with antilight of only the spotlight style, but the angle was such that no antilight came through the window. 

ohhh interesting. didn't know you could use style like that for antilights. that makes it much more useful.

btw, like the fake hdr idea. that's a great way to make interesting light without relying on sunlight to do the job for you. 

you can often use antilights to mackle up some passable blob shadows to make a func integrate better into the world geo. 

btw, like the fake hdr idea. that's a great way to make interesting light without relying on sunlight to do the job for you.

Indeed - I alway go for a rather dim "twilight" sun effect these days - Quake was never supposed to take place during the day :} 

Did you check with BJP's light readme for possible addtions/corrections? 

are there any? admittedly, most of that is from memory, but i did quickly check it over for any blatant errors.

actually, now you mention it, i should probably link to that as there is a lot of info in it. i just find it's not very easy to find it, being buried at the bottom of a massive changelog (some info is actually in the changelogs too...) and being mixed in with both light and vis tools.
and some info came during the development of the tools when we talked over email.
bengt is a tool genius, but his documentation is not very accessible. :) 

I use filler lights too. Pretty much every light in any of my recent levels has a bright source light with short falloff and a lower intensity (50-175, sometimes 200) light with a long falloff, which tends to look more realistic than just one light with 300 intensity placed at the source.

However, I should probably try experimenting with the different falloff types, since it's probably possible to create the same thing using a single light with an inverse falloff or what have you.

I also used inverse lights for integrating funcs, but that's about all. They are useful in some situations for sure, but I don't find myself using them that often.

minlight is useful for doing very rough level work without having to make everything fullbright. It's good for quickly testing the angle of sunlight without having the sun cast thick shadows (you want to see the underlying architecture) and a very very low minlight can look ok I think. However, in most cases it's best to not use it since I don't think you can get the level any darker than that value - even using negative lights. 

aguirre's tools do allow negative lights to go below minlight, so you can darken a pit or something. 

I didn't realise that. I think the last time I looked in the readme it didn't allow them to go below minlight. 

Although I don't desperately need to save precache slots
, I was wondering about the teleport using entity only flag. In worldcraft there is no entity only flag for trigger_teleporter and I'd like to know if it's actually a hack or, if there is a flag, which number it is.

Anyone know? Negke? 

You need to create a point entity, e.g. trigger_relay, set all the necessary fields (targetnames, spawnflags + 2) and change the classname to trigger_teleport.