just gonna move this up since it is right up against the end of this last page.
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So, about that lighting write-up...
Lighting is definitely important, and I hope I can adequately explain what I mean to show, despite all the problems and the not so stellar examples. I got no capture card, no fileshare access, and these examples take a long time to make and these are not even the best ones by a long shot. (I will probably do more eventually) To make these .GIFs, I took a screenshot, moved a forge pieces just a bit, switch to player mode and waited for it to generate lighting, then I took a screen shot again and moved the pieces again, generated lighting and repeated this for every frame that I later comped in AE into .GIFs.
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The ambient/indirect lighting that is generated/baked onto your pieces helps your players with navigating your map by provides depth cues and visually separating the walls from the floors and ceilings as well as aiding in the process of judging distances and player positions. It is also useful for subtly guiding your players where you want them to go:
Click on Image to Expand to full size
As you can see, the direct sunlight and the dominant shadows are not the only aspects of lighting that are important, the walls and floor also receive a lot of 'indirect light' from the (non-forge piece) environment around them such as the sky.
(And, oddly enough, pretty much everything else in sight, even stuff that does not make sense like grass that is in entirely in shadow, but more on that later...)
So, when I say ambient/indirect shadows, I am referring to the colored gradients of shadow, or the
shading, that is seen inside the dominant shadows that are cast onto your forge pieces. Most importantly, the ambient/indirect lighting is what gives your forge pieces most of their color, especially on Ravine Forge variants. On Erosion variants, there is very little direct lighting so indirect lighting is also crucial. On the other hand, on Impact variants, there is very little effect from the indirect lighting, which is a shame.
So when your forge pieces get packed really close together and start to occlude the sky and surrounding environment around them, the ambient lighting is not able to reach into the crevices, folds and various levels of multi-storied buildings so the ambient lighting starts to become very flat and monotonous.
You can start to see this in the .GIF above, where the arrow is pointing on the floor when the building moves close to the raised floor on the left side of the .GIF:
The ambient lighting has a very short reach because Halo 4s ambient lighting system is a type of single pass radiosity, it does not include any form of diffuse interreflectivity between forge pieces where the direct sunlight can bounce off the floors and add-to/fill the room, and it can only really be seen subtracting ambient light inside the dominant shadows. So if you tightly enclosed spaces, your ambient lighting will become very flat and difficult to navigate very quickly. When most of your map is like this, that is when you run into the problems of completely monotonous, ugly, solid dark-brown lighting, such as I mentioned at the beginning. I see this way too often on many peoples maps, especially the ones I have seen on YouTube and ForgeHub. It can be difficult problem to overcome in tight interior maps, but in most cases all you need to do is make a window looking outside or open-up/raise the ceilings, because, even if it does not let in the sun, it will still add ambient/indirect light.
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Also, the games engine does not spend a lot of time generating the lighting/shadows when you switch from monitor to player mode, so they do not get a lot of samples, which makes the indirect lighting look all segmented and polygonal rather than the smoother gradients you would get from more samples.
The lighting info is not baked into the actual map file that people save to their hard drives and put on their fileshares, but rather it is regenerated every time you load the map. This is almost certainly done to save space by reducing the Forge variant's file size. So, just as a speculative aside, this seems to me like they might have the opportunity/possibility to make the lighting better quality by simply cranking up a few values behind the scenes, maybe in a patch. Probably not, but its just a thought. These parameters would make the lighting generation time a bit longer, increasing the number of samples it would generate, but increasing the quality significantly. This could perhaps be limited to only the times when you are trying to play your final map outside of active forging. Every MM match has a ten-second countdown timer before the game starts anyway, and the lighting generation only uses a small portion of this time. So, hey, why not use that extra time to get some more samples for some better lighting? Maybe there are other reasons that preclude this from being a possiblity, but I don't know.
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For the foundation remake, I set up the bases so that the warmer-colored parts of my map would be in the direct sunlight. This means the red and yellow team's bases would be very bright and easy to see, placed in the direct sunlight. On the other side of the map with the colder colors, it started out almost the same way. It was originally pretty bright because I was remaking foundation, which is an open top/sky map, and the way the sun is angled on Ravine let in a lot of sunlight:
Direct sunlight over some parts of the blue and green teams half:
Click on Image to Expand to full size
I decided it would be better to cover that half of the map in shadow so that the colder color team's, blue and greens bases would match with their lighting and you could naturally orient yourself. I could not move my entire map to a place where this would naturally occur from the terrain, since this would take a long time and it is quite hard to find a spot that will do it correctly and have enough room for the entire map. The shadowed, outside half of ravine is quite glitchy with its shadows. For example, the large forerunner structure has some strange problems where it will incorrectly bake its shadow unto your forge piece. Using the map geometry for lighting and shadowing also has some other problems that I will address later, particularly with indirect light, which they seem to handle with some cheap approximations. (Like the example I posted earlier where having a completely closed off box with just a little sliver of grass visibly sticking up through the ground plane of the box, somehow shining in a ton of green ambient light. IDK what is the deal with that, I guess the grass is radioactive?)
I wanted some more control over the lighting in my map so I ended up using some coliseum walls to block off the light from the sun and cast a shadow on the colder side of my map. I set up the wall piece to cast a shadow only over one-half of the map and stop in the middle when it starts to cross over into Read and Yellow team's base:
Click on Image to Expand to full size
The shadow seen over the blue/green team's side is cast by the coliseum wall piece that I placed far behind the camera
By controlling the distance of the coliseum wall away from the spot that it is receiving the shadow, I can control the softness and gradient of the ambient/indirect lighting inside of the shadow, while maintaining control of the shadow itself. The shadow stays in the same place and covers the same half/portion of the map, as intended, but the ambient/indirect lighting inside the shadow can be adjusted to be easily readable and soft enough to still provide depth cues and separation without clipping into flat dark grey-brown:
Click on Image to Expand to full size
The softer and lighter the lighting gets on the back walls and around the turret overhang section, the farther away the coliseum wall was at that point in time in the .GIF.
The only thing changing in the picture is how far above the coliseum wall (not shown) is from the top of the wall at the back of the map.
The effect here is pretty subtle, but you can use this idea/technique to get your ambient/indirect light to have a farther/deeper reach. In a way, it can also be sort of like targeted-adjustments/color-correction in photoshop. Just be aware that the ambient/indirect lighting tends to clip into flat, dark-brown very quickly.
Anyway,I hope I explained that adequately.
