Lighting

Hey lads.
After Mikes talk, I thought it would be a good idea to go around the Queens building to have a look at how our area it lit. 


Basement


After we make a room, why not go back to the Queens building to take note of where the light is coming in, and where artifical lights have been placed:

The large arrow on the last picture there represents the skylight. Mike seemed to enjoy the idea of having a big, bellowing source of natural light, so lets not forget about it!

Have a good look at how light bounces around too. I can't say I'm personally aware of how to get it working in UDK as of yet, but its good to have an understanding of how it flows around the building if we are trying to reproduce it. Make sure to take into account the different materials and textures in our area, and how the light will work with them. If there are technical things to take into account when texturing and making assets so that lighting them correctly later will be easier, it may be a good idea to discuss it now to save ourselves bother later.

The image below is of the huge doors under the gap at the right side of our level.

It doesnt seem very bright in the image, but remember this floor will be darker, so the light from upstairs will be shining down on the door through the hole above. Creepy, and the "NO ESCAPE" sign on the doors themselves add to the scene nicely.

We should probably begin to take note of every artificial light too - when I went in today I realised there were lights in places I didn't notice. We can cut back to save on tris, but its just good to know where they have been placed:

These lights are just under the stairs leading to the basement. They don' really seem important at first glance, but I noticed a little later that they  created a nice glow both on the stairs and on the area behind the staircase, creating almost quite an eerie upward glow. Sadly it didn't turn out as creepy in the photos as it was in person, but I think you get the idea:

Middle Floor

Sorry for the bad quality of this image, but it seems a lot of the light near the stairs here actually comes from the door:

If we are going to have the door blocked off, then we lose a lot of light here, so why not make the skylight brighter at the top? Exaggerate it a bit?

Other photographs from the middle floor:

The image below is the hole area above the huge double doors:

It is quite cool seeing the eerie green light shine up from here, but now that the basement floor will be flooded we will have to change it. Have the skylight shining down on it? Or have the glow from the water (underwater lights?) glowing up?

The image below shows almost a red light shining on the floor. This is from the red brick outside the window reflecting the colour: 

I know we intend to cover the windows, but if you want to have some of the shutters damaged it may be an idea to take note of what's outside. In this particular area however there is an alarm light (which wasn't turned on today). If this area was to remain dark we could still have a red glow from the alarm light if you guys wanted. 

Top

Just a shot of the skylight. I did have a few other shots of the top and the skylight, and what the player would see outside the skylight, but I don't know where they have buggered off to. 

I was thinking, if we weren't going to model the roof, then perhaps we could have the sun placed directly over the skylight, so when the player looks up they would get an eye-full of glare. This would save us modelling outside (sky, roof tops, etc) and would also explain why the skylight lets in so much light to the other floors. Would this kind of thing be possible?