Dungeon lighting in City Maps

Is there a way to make the dungeon lighting effects work with the shaded building symbols?

This is what I'm getting at the moment with my new Challenge map:

[Image_6842]

As you can see the church is reacting to the global sun direction (green arrow), rather than the dungeon lights (circled in red, direction shown by red arrows).

No worried if it can't be done. I was just curious to know if it could. I can work around it if not :)

EDIT: btw - discovered the easiest way to deal with those strange interference patterns you get with the dungeon lights. Make a pentagon of identical lights to the original one light that was causing the problem, and reduce the power of each to a fifth of the original power.

Comments

  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    The shading on buildings is due to the global sun direction, not the point light effects. The two do not interact in any way, as you observed (different code paths in different subsystems).
  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 81 images Cartographer
    edited October 2016
    No. You cannot make shading react to dungeon lights unfortunately,, they only respect the global sun. You can turn off their response to the global sun though, since it might not make much sense in this setting, or set the global sun to be straight above, shining down through your vent.

    Edit: Ninjaed by Joe.
  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 40 images Cartographer
    Thank you - both of you! LOL

    I think I will probably adjust the global sun direction a little until the two things roughly coincide, since I do want a bit of shading on the rooftops to give them shape and form :)
  • DogtagDogtag Moderator, Betatester Traveler
    edited October 2016
    Wait... shouldn't lighting effects work so long as the Wall Shadow, Point Light x effects are set on the right sheets, other Wall Shadow effects are disabled/removed, and Global Sun is deactivated?

    I mean, it's not as if the program knows the difference between a dungeon map and a city map. And even though building symbols can be more complex than other symbols, the lighting effects are based on sheets and sheet effects, right?

    Naturally, you would need a way to adequately light the map in general if you use light effects, though, since the default would be darkness everywhere. But if you're making an underground location, that may not be a bad thing.
  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 40 images Cartographer
    Hmmmn... I'm sort of catching what you say (my brain hurts Dogtag! LOL!). Would that change the shading on the angles of the roofs? (that was the only thing I wanted to change - the rest was perfect)
  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 40 images Cartographer
    I've just tried deactivating the global sun and all that happens is that the dungeon lights are totally ignored. The blackness away from them is gone, and the buildings are still responding to the deactivated global sun, so I don't think it works that way.
  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    The roof shading system is based on what amounts to normal maps (that is, there is an image that says what direction that pixel is facing in azimuth and elevation; this direction is combined with the sun angle to get a shading value that is combined with the color information on the symbol). This lighting model assumes that the light direction is fairly constant (that is, it assumes something like a sun is lighting the scene uniformly). This operation is performed as part of the texturing of the entity prior to any effects being run.

    The point light system is a set of effects that determines which part of the scene block illumination from light sources. These light sources, height determination (the point light setup), and occlusion test (point light finalize) are activities that occur during effects processing.

    The point light system and roof shading systems have no knowledge of each other and do not interact in any way.

    Making the point light system aware of the normal maps on symbols would require additional information that the system doesn't currently have: how high each element of the normal map is from the base level (that is, substituting a world-altitude bump map for a normal map). The normal map becomes largely redundant at that point because the angles can be computed directly from the bump map. Once you get to that point, you now have a full 2.5D rendering system and that's quite a bit outside the scope of CC3+.
  • DogtagDogtag Moderator, Betatester Traveler
    Ah, sorry, Loopysue. You're talking about the roof shading, not shadows from the buildings. I misunderstood.
  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 40 images Cartographer
    Cheese! No wonder my head hurts!! LOL!!

    Thanks for trying Dogtag, and thanks for explaining the details, Joe :)
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