(12-14-2011, 06:17 AM)kman Wrote: They're kinda an essential to creating a good mood
Naaaaah... I wouldn't say that, of course they add visual interest, but you can do just fine without. What might help with them would be to try and follow my bad
tutorial's first steps.
Quote:Dimmed the lights and tried to make the window's light look better (I can never get billboards to work right).
What makes your room look a little bit odd is the fact that your box light doesn't share the same color as the light sources inside the room. Feels like your box light has so much red that the window looks red.
I actually did some testing with the TDD map 10_daniels_room. Because TDD work is of quality ofc, I thought it could prove a few points and I could learn stuff. (for some reason I kept the dusty fogs, glitching around)
Here's the room how it looks normally
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32826151/daniels...normal.jpg
Then I deleted all decals, some random rubbish from the ground and straightened the paintings. Feels a lot emptier and boring, so adding crap and as much random stuff helps.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32826151/daniels...sstuff.jpg
Then I started playing around with the lighting, changing the box lights values from:
Red 0.075
Gre 0.05
Blu 0.04
to
Red 0.05
Gre 0.05
Blu 0.02
But the main thing giving the room that steady light was the chandelier, or more like the point light under it that had big radius covering the whole room with tight falloff map. I reduced the size and intensity of that big light and added 8 smaller point lights with varying intensity to boost the lights from candles and window. Result had a lot more shadows and felt darker, so it was less like "daniels bedroom".
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32826151/daniels...weaked.jpg
Then I tried giving the lights more saturation. I didn't want to go edit the lamp entities point lights though so it isn't that obvious to see. Feels a tad warmer without the grayish light from the window. If you are uncertain how to properly adjust the color of lights in the editor, try playing around with something like
this .
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32826151/daniels...ration.jpg
You can see the actual value didn't change that much by comparing these desaturated pictures with added contrast. (I failed and it did change quite a lot though)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32826151/daniels...ntrast.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32826151/daniels...ntrast.jpg
Then I just started playing around and gave the room different colors with different lighting.
Orange and
green
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32826151/daniels...egreen.jpg
Orange and
blue (look at your main menu background map, this just works, not for a bedroom though)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32826151/daniels...geblue.jpg
Okay I think that's enough of this... Daniels room has soft steady lighting that makes it comfy. Mostly yellow lighting, from candles and window, again comfy and also dirty with low saturation and those gray fog particles.