Guide: Making a Nighttime Map

[Lokgroa]

This is a short write up guide on how I got my Sorgan map to look good at night.

1. Ambient Light/rgb

First thing to do is read Marth's guide to ambient lighting and rgb, found here:
https://www.aaron-gilbert.com/blog/2021 ... ting-swbf2

https://www.aaron-gilbert.com/blog/2021 ... techniques

Second thing to do is backup your world somewhere safe so if you mess up the world and lights, you can restore the old version and try again. Also keep a log of what you are doing with the lighting, just enough logs to understand what you did. I screenshoted the map over and over as I changed things until it was right.


Think about where the sun is and where the moon is. If one of them is out, can you see them unobstructed or are there clouds in the sky? If one of those is out, where are the shadows being cast?
With a directional light in the zeroeditor, you can rotate and move the light to represent the sun/moon you might have set up in the sky file.
However the downsides of the directional light is that the side that is facing away from where the light is hitting will be darker and this may cause a problem. On Sorgan, I made sure the darker part was still light enough to see the units. There is no moon on the Sorgan map because I couldn't get the directional light to work without making one side darker.

2. Sky
I changed the Sky file to be black and to load in the stars.


3. Lights
How do the people who live in your maps see at night? Think about if there are lampposts/fire in the map you are creating and think about if you need to add additional lights to your world to build the nightime atmosphere. I added lights to flameposts and experimented with how bright the light was, how well it illuminated the objects around it.
You can add lights with HP nodes and through the ODF prop files OR you can add them in the zeroeditor.

4. Texture colour/vertex colouring
If you are using stock textures and props, the colour and lighting on the prop may be set up to look right for a daytime map. This will stick out on a nighttime map and break the illusion of night. For the Sorgan map, I changed the sky tree texture and the ground plant textures since they were too green.

For the texture, you need to split the texture down into rgb. In gimp or photoshop you can do this. I used gimp. Under Colours, Components there is an option named Decompose, when you click it a box will come up that will give you options on "extract channels". If you know your texture has an Alpha channel, select RGBA if not RGB. Also deselect Decompose to Layers- you need them to be separated out. Once you have 3 or 4 open images of each respective channel, you can go to the red channel image and then Colours, Components and this time Compose. Select the correct channel image to each channel and then compose. After you have then got an RGB image that you can edit without worrying about the alpha channel.

Then you can edit the texture with adjustments to whatever you want. I've used hue/saturation, Brightness/Contrast, Colour Balance or combined adjustments. For the plants I shifted the green colour to be more blue.

Once you are done, save the new image and load it into GIMP and then Decompose to RGB channels and then Compose a new image with the correct RGB channels and add the Alpha Channel.


5. Effects
I added fog on my map, it helps create the nighttime atmosphere since you subconsciously associate it with cold.

6. Shadow Volumes
You can add a sub model that will create an object that casts a shadow onto the terrain.

7. Colour Theory
When designing a map or a piece of art or a 3d space, you need to think about contrast, once you understand this you understand how things can be changed.

If something needs to stick out, then you've got to make the things behind it duller/a different colour so that there is a contrast there, the bigger the difference the bigger the contrast.



The units in the game must stick out, Some nighttime maps are hard to play because you can't see the units clearly and can't recognise the team. You can take the ambient light level down but if you can't recognise the units, it doesn't work. For Sorgan, I took it down as far as I was happy with taking it so that the units are still clear. It isn't a truly pitch black nighttime atmosphere like in the show.

This video explains colour theory in a good way and on how contrast is built up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUPa4Gs9jGY



Drawbacks/Compromises
The show atmosphere has a directional light from the at st raider headlamp lighting things. For the episode it's used for the story purpose. I couldn't do that.

The darkness in the show is much darker, once I took it too far, you couldn't distinguish the units and so I compromised and raised it.