Light Entities
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In this tutorial , we are going to learn about creating Lights.
Bare in mind that a low spec system would not show too many lights, as this would cause performance issues. Placing too many lights would make the engine disable some when the camera is at a certain angle or position, making your room/area look very dark all of a sudden. So try to use as minimal as possible to avoid compatibility issues in your map. It is recommended that you use less than five light entities in an area.
There are 2 types of Light Entities, they can be found under: Entity > Lights.
When you place your light, be sure to turn on the Helpers to see it's radius
Light
Common Entity Properties
- Active > Is the light turned on or off ?
- Radius > Size of the sphere that is being affected by the Light Entity.
- Diffuse > Colour of the light.
- DiffuseMultiplier > Strength of the colour of the light.
- HDRDynamic > How much HDR the light emits (Requires r_hdrrendering 1)
- SpecularMultiplier > How much the light effects the reflection in material surfaces.
- AffectThisAreaOnly > If the light is in a Vis Area, should it bleed into another nearby VisArea ?
- CastShadow > Should the light cast dynamic shadows from Objects ?
- FakeLight > Does the light emit any light at all ? (Use for this is below)
- LightStyle > Different types of lights such as flashing, pulsing etc.
Creating a Light Beam
Light beams that appear almost Sun Shaft like, and interact with Objects can be easily made.
- Place your light in the Sandbox
- Under Entity Properties, click the empty space in 'Texture' and click the Yellow folder that appears.
- Assign 'light_glow.dds' that is found in the directory Game/Objects/Library/Lights
- Hit M for Material Editor and apply the material 'lightbeam_alien' the Light, which is found under 'Materials>lightbeams'
- The width of the beam can be increased and decreased with the 'ProjectorFov' property under Entity Properties of the Light entity.
- The beam can be used as decoration only by applying the 'FakeLight' parameter.
Indirect Light
You can use this when you want a room or a place to be lit up well without making it look like there's a bulb inside, this is why specularmultiplier is disabled for this, so reflections on objects won't have an especially bright spot which would resemble the lightbulb's position. Other then that, you can use this like you did for 'Light' entity.
