Adding lighting effect without changing global sun?
Royal Scribe
🖼️ 250 images Mapmaker
I am working on a map in which a statue is holding an object that is glowing. Elsewhere in the room there's a candle partly in a wall's shadow. Is there a way to add a lighting effect that is in addition to, rather than instead of, the global sun?
I've watched and rewatched Remy's Night & Day video of July 2020, and Ralf's Dungeon Lights video of a few months ago, but I still haven't figured it out. I might be missing something obvious. When I tried adding a lighting effect, everything was plunged into blackness because it overrode the global sun. In another thread, Sue said that the parts of the map not affected by the lighting effect should be on sheets that are below the sheet where the lighting ends, but I'm hoping to avoid that since it would entail a massive revamp of the map. Also, that may not be the same issue for me, because I'm not trying to have dark areas and daylight areas, just extra lighting that is in addition to the daylight.
I tried an alternate approach by putting a yellow circular polygon on the object and using transparencies and glows to make it simulate a light, but that doesn't affect nearby wall shadows, and I couldn't get the glow and transparency settings to look good. I'm okay with it not affecting wall shadows if I can at least make it look like it's glowing. If the yellow polygon approach is the best, can anyone recommend some good settings for transparency/glow/edge fade/blur/etc. effects?
Thank you!
Comments
Can you share the FCW with us, please?
Sure!
The lighting effects using polygons are on the braziers in the temple, the two large statues, and the candles. (The mosaic reflections, meant to represent a reflection from a mosaic made with naturally luminescent gemstones, is a separate effect using custom symbols that I made.)
Is there a way to add a lighting effect that is in addition to, rather than instead of, the global sun?
The answer is most likely no. CC3+ doesn't have a generally physically-based lighting system. It has a few effects that simulate certain kinds of lighting effects, but those different kinds of effects generally don't interact with each other. The Point Light system constructs a model of a surface using one or more Point Light, Setup effects and the "Point Light, Finalize" effect uses that surface model to determine which parts of the image are lighted and which aren't. In contrast, the drop shadow and wall shadow effects use image processing techniques and copies of the original surface image to generate their results. The two subsystems operate completely independently of each other and can't combine their results.
The Global Sun feature is a shorthand way of specifying the direction to be used by multiple drop shadow; wall shadow; and effects like Bevel, Lighted or Texturize that simulate lighted surfaces. Changing the Global Sun value changes it for all of the effects that use it: it's much simpler for you to change the one value than it is to hunt down every direction in every effect that might have one. The Point Light subsystem, in contrast, uses a list of lights within the drawing to tell the Point Light, Finalize effect how to illuminate the occluder model created by the various Point Light, Setup effects.
As you mentioned later, using a semi-transparent light-colored set of geometry can simulate various kinds of lights that don't interact with anything else, especially when used with Blur and Blend Mode effects. Using this technique is probably the most effective for your case in terms of both controllability and final visual appearance. The best combination of effects and the settings for the effects will depend in large part on the desired effect.
Thank you, @jslayton. I suspected as much. I might leave the full version without lighting effects and then do a zoomed-in interior-only version with the lighting effects, where it doesn't matter that the outside area is now in darkness.
Thanks for sharing the FCW :)