Cryengine Interior Lighting Tips?

PogoP

Hey all

I'm making an interior scene in Cryengine, and just wondered if anybody had any tips/tricks on how to get nice looking interior lighting. Obviously Cryengine is fantastic at exterior lighting but interior lighting is a whole other kettle of fish and I'd love to see how you guys go about doing it.

I've done a little research on the wiki but it's very formal and more technical, as well as a little bit outdated. I'd be interested to hear more practical ways of going about doing it. If anybody has any example maps that would be incredible too!

Cheers all!

s6

It may not be the same form of interior you may have your eye on, But this piece seems very well done. Both interior, and exterior.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=123179&highlight=lighthouse

Might be worth picking the authors brain a bit in that thread about how he went about it.

I know next to nothing about cryengine, But just like with anything else, It depends a bit on what your making to give a decent answer. If you want light theory, Rather than technical talk, You may give an example of what you want to achieve, or explain it a bit. Interiors vary from room to room, house to house, Building to building, etc. My point is the interior of a post apocalyptic tornado bunker is going to be lit quite differently then a contemporary kitchen interior and the theories behind those two will vary just as much.

PogoP

Yeah that's very true. It's more the technical aspect of lighting within Cryengine than the theories behind lighting itself.

The scene I'm working on is sort of a dilapidated apartment so the main lighting will be from the sunlight shining through, hence me wanting the bounce lighting effect. This would be easy in UDK but I don't want to go back to baking after working with realtime editors so much!

Grimmstrom

If the interior your doing is going to have transparent windows you can use portal volumes to define where the windows are and this will let the exterior light filter in.

If its fully enclosed interior I just tend to use a combination of spotlights and point lights, generally with one main light that casts the major shadows of the scene.

I'm presuming your aware of using vis areas for interiors but if you need any advice I'd be happy to help out.

Drew++

Using environment probes ( http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC2/Environment+Probes ) with Light Boxes and Light Shapes ( http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC2/Light+Boxes+and+Light+Areas) ) is a good way to get nice interior lighting. It can add a good directional feel and look to the lighting.
For faking bounced lighting, use a bunch of ambient lights. It's deferred, so don't be afraid to use a bunch of them

If you're completely interior, you can use vis areas, which contain their own ambient color... Good for very dark areas.

Zepic

Does anybody know if the Time of Day editor effects your environment probes? For example, if I'm using a viz area and don't want the sun and all that affecting my scene, will it keep them from working? Like is there an option that I need to toggle?

Ark

Cryengine use's Deferred Lighting, so while it grants plenty of dynamic lights on-screen, you need to keep them small and try not to let them overlap to much to avoid high fill-rate costs. Since the lighting is now costly on the amount of pixels that are lit, compared to the number of surfaces lit in Forward Rendering.

Zepic wrote: »

Does anybody know if the Time of Day editor effects your environment probes? For example, if I'm using a viz area and don't want the sun and all that affecting my scene, will it keep them from working? Like is there an option that I need to toggle?

Vis-Areas have toggles that allow you to exclude the Sun, Sky and GI.

Probes obviously need to have light in that area they capture to relight the scene.

PogoP

Awesome, thanks for the tips guys. How useful are Irradiance Volumes? They haven;t been mentioned so far! I tried using them but they end up making the lighting look quite blocky.

Ark

You can stack the LPV together to get greater fidelity, plus you can have many more lights present in the volumes, only drawback is no shadows. Haven't messed with them to much myself, they seems quite situational.

MightyT

This is relevant to my interests/needs. Trying to make an office complex, with cheap drop ceilings with a buzzing fluorescent light every 2 meters or so. Now that I'm trying to light it, running into the problem of having it seem like the bulb is what is casting the light. For the light to illuminate the ground, the radius needs to be about 3 meters, which causes several dozen instances of overlapping per room. Wondering just what would be the best way to light a room that appears to have many small light sources, while making some actual drama by not just flooding the room with a vizarea fill. Hey thanks for any advice, this thread is proving helpful