https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244201/d76966b2-a63b-41bc-8117-fa5cb39f180b/20190504184618_1.jpg
all i want to do is light big indoor areas like how warehouses and aircraft hangers. ive tried messing with the distances and brightness settings but nothing seems to change. so how do you do it?
Where are the lights in there? I can't make them out.
To improve this you could basicly put spotlights with 170 something degree angles and appropriate light values on every surface that emits light. To give it a global shine you could add similarly large spotlamps with lower brightness values shining in the opposite direction on those emiting surfaces, so it adds light to the surrounding area of those emitters. That is to avoid huge amounts of power for the bouncing light to cross the room. It's a more direct lighting approach, with good control instead relying on the bounces.
Set the overhead lights brightness to 1000-2000 and don't mess with the distance values. If you don't really know what they do, leave them default cause like it says in the editor, it can create unrealistic lighting pretty quickly.
Here's what I'd set on the overhead lights:
Entity: light_spot
brightness 203 207 216 1500
constant 0
linear 0
quadratic 1
Inner (bright) angle 45
Outer (fading) angle 90
It'll give you something that looks like this. Adjust the colour to your liking if daylight is not what you're going for.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/285360/a9d630a8-73d2-464d-89d3-9297260fa667/20190422063258_1.jpg
Problem is as you can see from my picture is the ceiling is pretty much unlit. This is partially because I have the lights set to toggle on/off so they didn't bounce. Even if I didnt do that, the ceiling may still be very dark or unlit. This is cause bounces kinda suck is source version before CS:GO so a way to fix it is shift-drag all the ceiling lights down about 64 units to dupe them, change them to a basic light entity, and set the settings as follows:
Entity: light
brightness 203 207 216 50
constant 0
linear 1
quadratic 0
I notice you have lights on those windows. The texture isn't meant to be a light source window, but you could easily make a new one with a selfillum flag and an alpha layer if you know how. Placing an omnidirectional light source (basic light entity) coming from them tho is ill-advised. Instead, use a light_spot that's just a few units from the glass pointing in the opposite direction with the following values
Entity: light_spot
brightness 181 215 142 200
constant 0
linear 1
quadratic 0
Inner (bright) angle 90
Outer (fading) angle 90
Setting Linear to 1 and quadratic to 0 and having the angles both the same allows the light to behave like it's a window and will cast a fake ambient light into the room which can look something like this:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/285360/7c980a64-fbe8-453b-93c1-c73b3b825843/20181015182817_1.jpg
Biggest thing to remember here is brightness values are annoying and more often than not need to be set way higher than you may think. They take lots of time to learn and usually involve trial and error no matter how skilled you are. When I find a room isn't lit the way I want it to be, I usually cordon off the area so I'm not wasting time compiling the rest of the map and set the value vastly different than before. If it was too dark for example, I'd triple the brightness value and compile it. Then I just adjust it a little, compile, adjust a little, compile, until I get it right.
Everyone has their own methods so ask around if you see some really cool lighting somewhere and wanna know how they did it.
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