Step Three

Lights

Lighting is one of the most important feature of your map. It’s necessary whether you’re making an indoor or outdoor location, and knowing what to use for either of those will make a big difference in your map. Lighting provides color as well as brightness, and these two features will definitely add or subtract from your map’s atmosphere depending on how you use them.

 

If you have no lights in your map, all of your textures will be fullbright--completely lit without any shadows or highlights. It’s not a very good look for most things, unless you’re using a style like Kingdom Hearts, a game where all the shading came from the textures. Adding one or more lights automatically disables fullbright textures.

Creating a Light

Lights are entities, like spawn points, or scripts that we covered in Step Two. They can be selected and created using the create an entity tool. They can be found in the drop down menu starting with the word ‘light’.

Deciding Which Light to Use

There are four types of light in Hammer, and those of you with 3D modeling experience will recognize three of them.

1. The ‘light’

In the entity drop down menu, this light is simply labeled ‘light’. It is an omni directional light that is known as a ‘point light’ in the 3D modeling program Maya. This light lights up an area in a spheroid shape. It’s good to use for fires, machine glows, and for areas that generally need some illumination.

2. The ‘light_spot’

This is a light that acts and appears like a spot light, as it is named. It is one of the more natural behaving lights, and it’s especially useful for artificial light sources, such as lamps, spot lights and lightbulbs.

3. The ‘light_environment’ 

In Maya, this is known as a ‘directional light’. It is a light that fills the entire map with lighting that points a certain direction. It is called an environment light because it is used most often to simulate a sun. We will discuss this further once we start building an outdoor scene.

4. The ‘point_spotlight’

It is a light capable of dynamic lighting and it’s a bit more detailed than the other three lights. It’s best used for really dramatic spotlights or lighting. 

Tweaking a Light

Every light has properties that can be edited. These can be accessed either by double clicking on a light in the camera viewport or by right clicking and selecting ‘properties’. You can change the color by selecting either Brightness or BrightnessHDR (1 and 2). Clicking either will open up an option next to the text box (3) that will open a color picker. Picking a color will result in the numbers in the text box changing. The forth number in that text box is the brightness amount. Increasing/decreasing that number will alter how bright your light is. Experiment! But take note that the HDR brightness is on a different scale. Don’t go too high, or you’ll just be rendering white pixels like a Gamebryo Engine.



In the next few posts, we will cover outdoor building, displacements, and maybe even have a podcast.