I'll never understand why people re-use other forgers aesthetics and themes for their own use. Like forge is supposed to be creative and personal, if you don't have those creative juices, don't forge. I don't want to see my **** slightly modified, I wanna see new things. At least credit the original forger
The thing is, if I put out my structures/buildings/art as prefabs, I would have literally no reason to complain. If that were the case, I'd be putting out things for the public to use. But I didn't do that. Some people literally go into your map, prefab your stuff and use it for themselves. It's just sketchy and really lame. Make your own crap people.
I mean i’m not going to say that it doesn’t bother me when I see assets I took time to create for a specific reason on another person’s map, especially since almost all of them are not released to the public yet. But as a creative person, I always have the ability to create again. If someone felt that my creation helped their vision along, then surely I have done my job to inspire them regardless. Besides, we don’t own anything in Forge anyway. ****ing nerds.
You cover the map in a large box of chromas or floors and it casts a shadow over the whole thing, which lets you turn every objects lightbake off. But you cant create shadows in this game, so the lighting always looks artificial, which is why its best for indoor maps.
Thanks fellas. So is a map that is chromaboxed held in a higher regard? Considering all lighting comes from the creator? Or is maps without chromaboxing held in higher regard? Considering you're working with natural lighting which can be a *****.
Lol just do what looks right for the map. Using natural lighting means you need to be really knowledgeable with the lightbake system, canvases, cube mapping.. Not much flexibility as you're working within the canvases limitations and need to know to how angle everything beforehand. Chromaboxing/emmi boxing means you need to know how to make things like good without any help. How lighting should bounce, diminish.. Normally the lighting engine takes care of that on its own with natural lighting so you've gotta be a bit more observant. They're just different.
@Yevah I prefer natural lighting because its not just the user lighting you have to manipulate but the geometry aswell. Im sure goat could explain this better but with natural lighting theres a specific area of difficulty that comes from building your map in a way that utilizes the natural lighting to showcase certain areas of the map that you would want players to focus on or help create a unique atmosphere. You basically end up building the layout, geometry and user lighting into the natural lighting instead of chromaboxing in which you more-so just have to build the user lighting into your map. With natural lighting you get the best of both worlds because you still have the opportunity of making dark/gloomy areas where you could do all of the user lighting on your own but still have a daytime environment. The downside is like multi said, youre working within the limitations of the canvas and also have less flexibility with the engine. Alongside the above, building a nice atmosphere into a naturally lighted map doesnt come as easy as it does with dark chromaboxed maps. I personally feel you can fumble around with the lighting on a chromaboxed map and get good results quicker than with natural lighting but with chromaboxed youre entirely on your own from the start and need an understanding of the aspects of lighting that multi mentioned. I'd say in my own opinion its more rewarding to get advanced level results from natural lighting and when its done correctly i certainly see it as being more prestigious. Mostly because its more of a headache. Honestly... theyre just different.
Chromaboxing's original purpose was to cast a shadow over everything to create an evenly lit area, which allows you to turn the individual "light sources" of your objects off and keep your lightmap (RAM available for lighting) down. Thus, the technique starts you at a baseline where you have complete control of your light sources and values - at least, relative to the canvas it is on. For instance, a chromaboxed map on Barrens has a different contrast value than on Tidal, and on Glacier and Alpine, the fog settings will be different. But even then, you're avoiding the hassle of dealing with the canvas, which gives you a headstart. Natural lighting on the other hand requires arbitrary knowledge of every element of each canvas: the cubemap location, the light source, the actual color of the light and shadows and how they respond to every filter, the way fog settings behave, and even the performance on that canvas. It's different for every canvas and has changed across updates, so it is indeed a constant headache. When you want to create a map with natural lighting, you're effectively starting at negative numbers due to those obstacles. As a result of these challenges, many of my projects have been abandoned due to lighting issues. It's quicker to get chromaboxing to look good, but the fact that the lighting objects in this game's engine do not create shadows hurts the authenticity of the technique. You can blur the lines by blending values, fall-off ratios, gobos, and fog settings, but you'll never truly be able to create shadows. Now, creating a shadow is a misnomer, because shadows are always there; you can't actually create shadows - rather, it's the absence of light that uncovers a shadow's presence. The lights we have do not "create shadows" dynamically because they pass through objects, and when an object cannot block light, it cannot cast a shadow (it can still diffuse, refract, and reflect it though). Therefore, because my lights pass through objects, I can't create an object in a chromabox, shine a point light on one side, and then have a shadow appear behind it. Also keep in mind that your chromabox is already casting a shadow over the entire map. We are not turning the canvas light off when we make a chromabox, but rather blocking the light altogether. If we could actually change the canvas lighting (or turn it off altogether) and create shadows with lighting objects - even while under a chromabox - then we'd obviously have the freedom to do whatever we wanted. In any case, a poorly lit chromabox map is going to look absolutely terrible, but well lit ones will more or less all have the typical "dark, flat, foggy" look. Whereas with natural lighting, it's really hard for your map to look bad if you do even a decent job of matching your theme with the geography and season of the skybox. And the fact that there is a wide variety of them helps diversify the visual palette. However, the best naturally lit maps will be built with the color and angle of the light source in mind, using the geometry to frame god rays and contour shadows in a way that invokes emotion. You don't attain "good lighting" just by using the natural lighting and leaving it open to the sky. Good lighting is based around composition, and composition simply means you treat your light like a character and give it a chance to shine (pun intended) by framing it. And again, a ray of light from the canvas is going to "create a shadow", whereas placing a lightray there is just going to make a 2-dimensional lightray. I mean, our lights aren't even volumetric (3-dimensional). Either one can be impressive when done right, but I'm personally more fond of naturally lit maps - not just because it looks more realistic, but because it's more fun to me to build a map around real light and shadow. One of the most appealing parts of environment art to me is ambient lighting because it flexes my artistic muscles the most. But at the end of the day, lighting is as much an art as it is a science, and regardless of which method you use, you'll need an understanding of how light behaves to get the most out of the limited tools in this game. There's really only a difference between the two methods because we are using Forge, and that difference comes down to which pool of limitations you want to cast your net in. Remember, chromaboxing actually uses objects. TL;DR: natural > chroma
I appreciate it everyone. I've seen the technique used often and played on a ton of maps that use it, I just never understood the purpose to the fullest extent. Thanks for the help and explanation.
They're definitely right that using natural lighting is trickier in the sense that 1: you actually need to build with some sort of foreknowledge and restriction to allow the natural lighting to enter different areas, and 2: the lightbake system is a ***** and a half to learn. That being said, unless you really really REALLYYYYY know what you're doing 90% of the time emmi boxing your map (I feel) gets better results than natural lighting. The darks with natural lighting, will frankly never be that dark. It always looks like some soft grey and desatured colors where boxing the map seeeems like it gives you better color variety..or at least the objects are reacting the lighting's colors better because there's no outside source. I've seen some really good naturally lit stuff from Goat but frankly.. I don't think anyone else is even close to replicating that practice. It just takes too much stupid forge knowledge of what canvas, what lightmap, what cubemap color, fog settings, coordinates, terrain bitmaps, and other nonsense to really perfect that and just about everyone else is not at that point yet. Chroma boxing and slapping in bright ass point lights will pretty much instantly get you to that "6/10 I can see where I'm going and no objects are discolored." but it's realllly difficult to hit that ultra believable 9 or 10 range because so many emmi boxed maps basically look the same. Blown out grungy shadows with harsh and oversaturated colors. It can be hard to be subtle, and believable, and efficient with chroma boxing. Anyways, they're two pretty radically different skill sets. Both worth learning. Natural lighting is probably easier to learn but a lot more difficult to get REALLY good results out of. EDIT: Just realized I kept switching between saying chroma box/emmi box. They're the same thing I just use big flat floor pieces on 0 black emissive instead of chroma screens because they get better results.