Problem printing a lighted town in Pieces
I put together a lighted town, drawn on the lighted dungeon template. This is a reworked map that I posted earlier on here. I wanted to print it off on 4 sheets of paper (2x2) so that I could have a nice, big map in the middle of the table for everyone to look at. When I print it into PDFCreator, the lower left section is appropriately lit and the other sections are not.
The lights are laid out to have one large, softer light source in the lower left corner and then there are smaller lights to give the buildings the feeling of being lit at night. I have noticed this problem with the lighted dungeon that it will not show light sources not actually visible in the window (so if I zoom in on a section, only the light sources in that section are shown), but was hoping there would be a way around this when printing. I thought about putting a couple of other light sources in the other print quadrants but the shadows will likely be wonky.
Any thoughts?
Nick
p.s. I attached 2 pdfs, one is the whole map printed out on a single page, one is a 2x2.
The lights are laid out to have one large, softer light source in the lower left corner and then there are smaller lights to give the buildings the feeling of being lit at night. I have noticed this problem with the lighted dungeon that it will not show light sources not actually visible in the window (so if I zoom in on a section, only the light sources in that section are shown), but was hoping there would be a way around this when printing. I thought about putting a couple of other light sources in the other print quadrants but the shadows will likely be wonky.
Any thoughts?
Nick
p.s. I attached 2 pdfs, one is the whole map printed out on a single page, one is a 2x2.
Comments
One of the early experiments made the assumption that lights would be visible even if they were off the screen, but that experiment led to lots of things being visible that shouldn't have been because there would have been occluders between the light and visible view area. A similar problem happens when the system renders at such a high resolution that the output needs to be tiled: lighting varies from tile to tile. The lighting needs to be a global solution and local effects like splitting up the map break that assumption, giving bad results.
Another tradeoff results in the streaks that are visible on the map. The lighting algorithm shoots rays from the light out into the world in a circle around the light. If there aren't enough rays then there will be gaps between the rays that result in those streaks. The number of rays is chosen based on the assumption that the lights will most likely be in the middle half of the screen (more rays = longer to compute). Your map shows a failure in that assumption. Have you tried Wall Shadow, Directional for that big overall light instead of a point light? The directional shadows shouldn't have the same sorts of artifacts as the point lights because their assumption is that the light is at infinity.
You may also notice little halos around your trees and other items with built-in alpha shadows. Those artifacts come about because the ray-object hit test is an all-or-nothing test: if there's even a little bit of the object that's not opaque, then it's treated as fully opaque. So shadows are treated as part of the opaque object, meaning little halos around many of the prettier symbols.
The original intent of the lighting effect was as a kind of visibility check, but it's gone way beyond that ( http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/burnout.gif is the original proof-of-concept animation showing lighting in a dungeon with the story of an adventurer's torch burning out and his mad dash for the exit ).
As a workaround, I'd print a large-scale pdf of the complete map (A2, A3, etc), and then use the current Adobe Reader X to do the tile printing on smaller pages. The Poster print function in Reader X allows this.
Thanks for your help! I have a one-off CoC campaign in about a week and am kind of panicking!