Ah the strombine lighting.
I've known Lun for a long time, so this isn't anything against him, but that lighting setup is a good tech demo, nothing more. It's basically a 1D lightmap
In reality doing that lighting setup is a pain in the backside for a few reasons:
- it takes a lot of patience to paint the ambient texture
- you have to have an understanding of how light bounce works to some degree, otherwise when you paint your ambient shadows it'll look strange
- in something like the Darkmod you can have up to 60 unique spaces or more, painting and ambient texture for each room just isn't feasible
- once you use this technique your area becomes very very static, you can't have moveable objects or physics objects because if an object moves you'll see a blob of shadow caused by nothing. And if you don't have ambient painted under all objects you'll have inconsistencies, then your scene just looks weird
- most of the areas don't have intense use of stencil shadows due to contrasting lighting styles, the use shadows is very small and subtle in strombine
You're better off adding realtime AO and or baked GI for your static environment.
Of course don't let me stop you from doing this, it's just not a good way to light your scenes for DOOM 3.
In regards to the other effects in the scene it's just planes with gradients and a fog light, pretty standard stuff.
I checked out the level on youtube, a one hour play through.
Verynice and I like it a lot, but there are a lot of improvements you can make to the ambient lights to have it more contrasty.
Right now it seems like the ambient is too high so it washes out the details, and the lighting is too white.
Make sure to use and abuse the light falloff image. It makes the light darker or lighter depending on how you make it. You might already know of this, but it makes a big difference to ambient lit areas
http://i.imgur.com/bCw68jG.jpglights/wicky02_chandelier
{
lightFalloffImage makeIntensity ( textures/wicky02/lights/lightramp_light_to_dark.tga)
{
forceHighQuality
map textures/wicky02/lights/light_chandelier.tga
colored
zeroClamp
}
}
EDIT: I did a small test of what would be an outside city, and you can get some pretty ok falloff on the lighting
http://i.imgur.com/9dKOzXG.jpgIf you can image your Darkmod content there, I think it would look really good.