Does anyone know how to make the shadows darker in a Source map, without adjusting the ambient lighting? I know that the old hammer allowed this to be done through the bounce command, but it doesn't seem to work with the Hammer compiler.
I have the light looking the way that I want it to, but I want to add completely black shadows.
change the 4th value of ambient in your light env to 0.
ambient light will really wash out your scene. It basicaly makes everything neutral. Using less ambient will make more shadows and more contrasting. It all depends on the mood you are working to achieve.
Basically I have the light that I want. The sun is yellow, and the ambient is a dark blue. I would like to stick with this, since the non-shadowy areas look bright, which contrasts well with the darker areas. Also, the blue hue gets rid of the super brightness from the yellow light environment.
However, I would also like to make things darker, like in the old hammer where you could reduce the amount of bounce from the default (which was 8 bounces).
As a result, the map would keep the same colour and contrast between the light environment and the ambient light, except things would look considerably darker. I think bounce refers to how many time the light shines on each pixel or something.
I tried changing the ambient to really low numbers, but things look quite washed out.
The bounce command was not about making things darker nor was it about how many times each pixel was lit.
It controlled the amount of bounces each lightray should perform doing the radiosity pass. Zero bounces being direct lighting only.
This is how I understood bounce:
"Set number of radiosity bounces.
This option sets the number of times light bounces in the radiosity pass. By the time the code gets to this point, all the data is precomputed, and extra bounces are very fast. It will make the shadows less harsh using more bounces, but can help light up dark areas much more naturally"
So when using a low number of bounces, the shadows would be more pronounced. In source, it doesn't seem to have the same effect. Maybe the batch compiler wll be worth trying.
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