Truly, avoid minlight. There's no excuse to use it! 

Perfect excuse to use it:

It get rids of totally black areas of your map! 

Fine if you don't use -nominlight option in your litgh tool :P

This option allow you to have complete black areas if you use antilight (i.e light with negative value), while in other places, the minlight value allow to limit shadow darkness to something less "dark"... check if aguirRe's light tool have this option ;) 

... can also be a -nominlimit option... depending of the tool... :P 

Has anybody ever done a completely antilight "lit" level? Start out with a high minlight, and use the technique he describes to refine it?

Of course, it would probably be a stupid idea to do it arse-backwards like that, but hey, you never know till you try. If nothing else, you could do it just to say you did it! :) 

pics look great ;) keep the good work! 

vis blockers, guys. It's quake, not a flight sim. :)
Looks grand, Ricky, I hope it will be playable. 

Haven't really gone into using them properly, or even local minlights. Davinci painted on a black canvas because light creates what you see, what comes first is always darkness.

Following that idea you could antilight a high minlight / sunlight map or else try local minlighting the whole map with sunlight for outdoors and occassional point lights only for highlighting.

As opposed to chucking torches everywhere.

It'd take a long time but produce a very hand crafted and lit map. 

It get rids of totally black areas of your map!

Wow, why not just set it to 255 then? You wouldn't have to light the map at all!

It's lazy. You can never use shadow to intentionally hide things or direct attention elsewhere, you reduce the contrast of all the lighting in your map, and unlit areas wind up looking worse because all the textures are rendered at the same flat value instead of just being black. If a part of your map is dark, light it yourself. It's guaranteed to be better.

Look at efdm12 - it's gloomy and there's a lot of cool things done with light and shadow, but Frib avoided blackness with his actual lighting, not with minlight. 

You can start recording a demo, play through multiple levels, and then use demtool to split it up into individual .dem files to play in your engine of choice. SDA marathons are recorded this way afaik. 

Ive been using a minlight of 35. I think its good cause the sunlight is really low to, and I have the sun mangle set so that the sun is going down and the shadows are really long. I dont know if you have ever spent a lot of time running around as dusk out in the country but I think you'd find that the contrasts start to fade, and gradually your eyes start to adjust to the darkness.

I have put a lot of lights in the map as-well as using the sunlight settings, I dont think I would be able to get the desired effect using light entities only.

'Wow, why not just set it to 255 then?'

Because it would look shit, and we wouldnt want that now, would we?!?! 

seems like you do 

35 = 255? 

Has anybody ever done a completely antilight "lit" level? Start out with a high minlight, and use the technique he describes to refine it?

Of course, it would probably be a stupid idea to do it arse-backwards like that, but hey, you never know till you try. If nothing else, you could do it just to say you did it! :)



Awesome idea... It'd be worth a try as an experiment anyway.

I agree that minlight sucks, but it's great when you're speedmapping (or I guess, just lazy). If you have more time though and want a similar effect, low level lights with a huge range work better I find, eg light 50, wait 0.05. Put one of those lights next to a normal 200 brightness light (which you placed near an actual light fixture hopefully) and you'll get subtle light that extends into the darkness but doesn't look bland. 

I did use antilights in a few places in rubicon, but since then I haven't becuase they are very hard to use in a natural way. It always seems to look like a bite was taken out of the lighting or something. Maybe I haven't found the optimal way to use it (i think i was using it to darken spots in a sunlit room, which might be the problem. Maybe in a room where the positive light isn't so flat, the negative light would fit in better. 

to create some interesting results if approached conceptually like with dodge and burn painting in photoshop and gimp. You normally start off with a canvas at a medium point (128,128,128 - gray) and from there your dodge setting creates a light contrast and your burn setting creates dark contrast.

Say you start with a min light of 255, and you use antilight for darker contrast and additive light entities for brighter. At the very least, it would eliminate the problem where vertices with slight angler differences create a huge light/dark contrast that look unrealistic and you have to place ambient lights to soften the results.

Thanks, Mr Fribbles for this idea. I don't know how realistic it is to go this route as of yet, but it is something to think about. 

I took a chunk of a current map I'm working on, and created a gray texture using a color from from the mid grays of the Quake palette, as well as a gray sky texture. I replaced source lights with anti-lights under the beams above the stairs. Minlight was set to 255.

http://mortisville.quakedev.com/quake12.jpg

One obvious problem you'll see on the side walls, the anti-light created shadows create their own shadows, but it is likely a problem that can be minimized with some tuning of the entity settings for falloff. 

i agree with lunaran on this. i used minlight on all of my early maps and the major complaint with them from everyone was usually the poor lighting (sometimes my penchant for horde combat though :P).

my later maps i used less and less minlight until i did one without it completely. i found the extra contrast you get from not using it is very desirable. it's more work, but it pays off in the end because it looks so much better. 

same scene but done with -extra4 -soft and the addition of two lights in the fore using FitzQuake instead of WinQuake. What is interesting here (at least to me) is the softening effect where the vertical line blends and where the faces receive multiple lighting/darkening sources. It's worth exploring as a potential lighting paradigm. 

but headthump that shot looks very cool. 

the glquake bug where all lightmaps are inverted when gl_texsort is 0 in 32bpp mode. (or was it gl_texsort 1?) 

...XeNoN did the lighting in one of his levels using the high minlight - antilight combination. I think it may have been his "outside of competition" 100 brush level Centurion. I may be completely wrong of course. 

Yes, I know about eyes adjusting. :)

At dusk when the sun is at a low angle you're getting a lot of scattered ambient light from the upper atmosphere. So, yes, there isn't much contrast between what's in direct sunlight and what's shaded from the sun, but to reduce all the other light contribution to the scene other than the sun to a single universal value is too broad an assumption to jump to. Nooks, crannies, and gaps where geometry meets other geometry, and areas farther from the sky, will all be darker than areas that are more exposed to open air. You get a lot of soft gradation between the two, soft enough that any minlight contribution will throw it way off. Having it makes a scene really pop with realism. Replacing it with a flat value will ruin it. 

would ambient occlusion be possible in a quake1 light compiler? o.o 

(that probably most here know) at sunset is that the stuff in the sun is orange (direct sunlight) while stuff in the shade is blue (scattered sunlight from the blue sky). You can notice this in the real world if you play close attention.