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Night lighting tool

T

toprob

Messages
1,133
I've always used Micrografx Picture Publisher's Light Studio for night lighting of building textures. PP has always been my image software of choice, but its unfortunate that it is no longer produced.
With the light studio you can load your texture image, add as many 'real' lights as you need (spot/flood/omni/directional) in any colour/angle/distance/brightness.
I have found these 'new' CDs on Ebay for 8 GBP. No, I'm not selling them myself:), although I was tempted to snap them all up and offer them through my store. I've been a PP fan for 10 years.
I've attached a Light Studio screenshot.
 
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I use Paint Shop Pro, which will do the same (but more expensive). One other method I use is to create a new layer in my image in PSP, which I flood with black, and then reduce the opacity to 75-90%, depending on how I will use it. Then I use the eraser function to subtlely "lighten" areas that I want to show. For lighted windows, I'll create a seperate layer just for the windows, which I will "inverse select so that only the glass part is selected. Then, in yet another layer, I'll add white and yellowish colour, either as a flood or from an airbrush to create lighting inside. Of course, I'll also reduce the opacity of this layer in order to allow the texture details to show through. This takes about 30-60 seconds, once you're good at it, but I think I could get better results if I was more careful and spent more time on it.

So for me, the use of layers makes PSP worth it.

- Martin
 
Used Light Studio and it is great.

I use PSP and always have.

But recently I read a article on night lighting
and on the authors recomendation got a
copy of Picture Publisher and used Light Studio
and it is great.
 
That indeed seems to be a nice tool. :)

I'm also using Photoshop though, for it's in my opinion the best program to build good textures for FS.
 
Just completed the alpha code in my autogen program that automatically creates night light textures for thousands of summer tiles in a single pass. It uses an edge detection routine and also makes use of its knowledge where the autogen houses are placed. I have some screenshots on the Avsim forum. I'll try to get that code finished and available on my website soon. Now if I could just go into the .bgl that only defines the summer textures and tweak it to include the lightmaps. Only method I could find was to pretend to build the textures anew from the initial .inf file after adding in the lines for the seasonal build.

Art
 
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