[BrowEdit] Lighting in a dark map

[VenomPB]

Hey, guys. I've been working on a map recently and I thought I'd have a little fun and make a night version of it, but I've run into a problem with the night version.

I decided that rather than use a dim lightmap to achieve a night effect I would use global lighting instead as that isn't affected by the user's lightmap preference in their client settings. However, this also means that just about every object is dimmed, including what would have been light sources had things gone my way. So now I have a bunch of street lamps and lanterns around my map that look really silly giving off light when they themselves aren't illuminated by the same light.

I figured a lot of y'all were good with mapping, judging from the map showcase forum, so I was curious if you had any tricks that could remedy this. The way I figure it there are 3 possible ways to cure my problem:

1. Effects -- Find a suitable effect to place inside of an object to make it appear to give off light. Effect 693 (translucent yellow circle) would have been perfect for this except that when you use it on a map it only displays as a tiny ball of light similar in scale to a spirit sphere (regardless of how you scale it, although I don't think effects are affected by scale anyways), whereas using @effect in-game produces a ball of light larger than your character.

2. Dim Lightmap -- I had originally taken a note from Chemical Crush's Aeven Forest map and darkened the map by making the main light dim, but in return I was greeted with every object being illuminated, making the map look kind of unnatural. And that's why I went ahead and used global lighting instead.

3. Something glitchy

About #3... I also have this thing happen with several objects in the map where they aren't affected by global lighting. Some objects will appear dark and others will be completely bright. I don't know how to replicate this, and it only happens when lightmaps are on.

Anyone know why that happens? If I could selectively make certain objects bright like that, that would be perfect.

So yeah. If you have any suggestions that would be awesome.

Edited June 19, 2012 by VenomPB

[Syouji]

The object's color is determined by the global lighting and lighting itself. Controlling independent models to be brighter than another is probably not possible based on what I know. I can try and play around with some global lighting settings to see if I can try and do a fix around it.

[VenomPB]

Yeah, I went to nif_fild01 to check out its lighting and some of its objects randomly do that too, so I can't argue with that. I'm thinking it's gotta be a limitation based on how darker maps are rendered in the client if even Gravity's maps are doing it. It's way more noticeable on my map though since it's loaded with tons of foliage objects all around.

For now I've gone with a happy medium and made the global lighting a little brighter so the difference in lighting is a bit more subtle based on suggestions previously made here.