Small problem with Light

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,694
2,579
The problem is that your light is going in all directions at once and is closer to the ceiling than the floor. In real life, light sources don't cast directly upward because they're blocked by some part of the fixture. So people almost always use light_spot entities instead. There's no really good way to accurately simulate a light bulb that casts light everywhere but up, sadly, but Double Cross uses the trick of placing nodraw brushes directly above them, set to be non-solid.
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
aa
Nov 2, 2007
4,775
7,669
If you want to get fancy and just need a very evenly lit room, you can tweak the quadratic/linear/constant keys. These determine how quickly the light dims with distance. Default is full quadratic but for something really flat and even you could try 0 quad, 1 lin, 1 cons, or something like that (they are just ratios relative to each other, the numbers themselves don't matter). Of course, if the light doesn't dim as quickly it will be much brighter so you would need to lower the brightness to get back where you want.
 

UKCS-Alias

Mann vs Machine... or... Mapper vs Meta?
aa
Sep 8, 2008
1,264
816
Well, i would suggest using a spot light that is at the ceiling which will make the floor better lit. And in the middle a normal light that makes it so everything is lit better.

The normal light will increase the light arround the bulb a little so it doesnt become dark and still imitates a light source there, the spot light gives the actual light.

But the spot light is prefered most by me.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,694
2,579
That's blocklight, not nodraw.

No, it's nodraw. Blocklight doesn't survive decompiles. They might use that occasionally on other maps, but I don't remember.
 

UKCS-Alias

Mann vs Machine... or... Mapper vs Meta?
aa
Sep 8, 2008
1,264
816
It probably would give unrealistic lighting if you have 10 lights in each room. Just place the light you already have at the middle in height with like half the brightness. then place a spotlight (16 units below the ceiling) aiming down with a brightness double of that.

That probably should already be giving better lights using just 2 instead of 10 of them in each room.

Ofcourse, you can adjust the values to see how much light you actualy need:
If you need more light on the floor but not on the ceiling make the spotlight brighter
If you need less light on the floor but not on the ceiling make the spotlight darker

If you need more light on both the floor and ceiling make the normal light brighter
same again for darker

If you want more light on the roof increase the brigthness of the small ligth and reduce the brightness of the spotlight.
 

xzzy

aa
Jan 30, 2010
815
531
You could also experiment with the lightmap scale. Set the scale on the ceiling to a really big number, this has the effect of washing out any light that hits that surface. Look it up on the developer wiki, they have some nice screenshot examples.

Another thing you could try is to use world lighting, which is much better at avoiding hotspots. Put some windows in your rooms with a skybox brush behind them and let those windows light the space. Then use low power point lights to fill in the dark spots you will undoubtedly end up with.