I am making a Halo 2 Covenant themed map, and I am struggling which canvas and lighting my map should be. I would much appreciate some ideas.
Tidal. Chroma box. All light bake off. Profit. If you don't know what I mean by this load up High Guard by Given To Fly. The map is completely enclosed with a chroma box and all blocks and terrain have light bake set to off. You can manipulate the lighting yourself and it has some more benefits which some other forger can explain way better than me.
@Ryouji Gunblade Taught me that Chroma boxs are the way of the past. Now you can use several 256x256 pieces, set to all black and emissive: 0. Much more black on the inside and unlike the chromas those 256 pieces stay black wherever you put em
So you would use lights to brighten up your map. How can I do that without using too many invisible lights?
Here's some tips, the gist of the method I use for lighting in chroma boxes... I break up my lights into two functions and color code them so I know what is what. Lights have two functions in my mind - to fill an area with light so it's easier to see, and to highlight certain areas and add vibe. First off, unless I'm making a map that uses part of the canvas, I box if off like the guys above mention. Having complete control over the lighting is the way to go. Turn light bake OFF on every object that you spawn by default and turn it on only when something looks weird with it off. To build the fill lights, I'll spawn invisible area lights and use magnets to lock one to the center of each 256 piece that makes up the ceiling. I set these to point lights, so they are large area lights. I give these a good amount of length, almost the maximum available, but I give them the minimum falloff ratio. You want the edges of the lights to just barely touch each other, without overlapping too much. I position these lights over the top of the map, so the edges are just barely touching the ground. This is to simulate overhead light or sunlight...I will start with these lights extremely dark, and bring them up until I can determine where the minimum noticeable brightness is, essentially. The goal of the fill lights is not to cover the map in light, but to simply make it so there aren't ares of the map that are too dark. I'm try to raise the blackest shadow from pure black to dark gray, and then I don't push the area lights past that. Now, a lot of people will tell you to avoid making large area lights because it will be a framerate disaster. It is important to keep in mind that this is all about subtley, about going up to the line and not crossing it. DO NOT **** around with making the lights brighter than 5 or 6 on the brightness dial. That is how you have a bad time with area lights. Let me re-iterate: start at the bottom of the brightness dial and work your way up. KEEP IT SUBTLE. If you've set up the fill lights correctly, the map should still be dark but the shadows will be evened out and the darkest point of the map will be clearly visible. Now it's time to stop yourself before you take it too far. At this point I select all my lights and change them to the "objective: secondary" color so they are yellow. I make all point lights yellow and all spot lights white so I know what's what. Now that I have fill lights, I focus on adding smaller lights and light fixtures to make the map look realistic and add artistic flair. Once again, I usually keep the brightness relatively low on my lights. I'll start by lighting up important areas of the map, weapons, power-ups, etc. Then I'll add light fixtures on the wall and the ceilings where the environment calls for it. An important tip here is that not every light fixture you add to the map has to be a light. You can turn fixtures down to .1 spread with high brightness and use them for only the lens flare. If you have a cluster of light fixtures near each other, use only the lens flare on the lights themselves and use a larger invisible light to cover the whole area instead of overlapping several smaller ones. Overlapping lights and using a lot of lights is a one way ticket to butt frame city. In general, your goal should be to light the map without applying a ton of lights everywhere. If there's a room in your map that you want to have a blue hue, put just ONE blue light down in that room and tinker with it until it looks right. Don't layer lights over lights over lights....If you find yourself in a situation where you are covering up bad light map spots by throwing a ton of small lights in the same area, you should take stock of the situation and probably start over from scratch. If you find yourself going down a rabbit hole like that, it's best to reset and start from a blank slate. I would recommend making a few tester maps in chroma boxes to experiment and get a feel for how the lights interact, what you have control of, etc. Some of the lighting system can seem intimidating, but as a guy that used to forge in natural light and now makes chroma box maps on the regular, I'll tell you it's worth it. Your maps will start to look a lot better once you get a hang of it. If you made it this far in my comment, you're the real hero...Good luck and welcome to team chroma box!