"Natural" lighting for mouth of caves?

[Rex Claussen]

I would like the mouth of a cave (or tunnel) to have some light from the outdoors but fade to darkness inside the cave. Using sectors & gradient lighting it's possible to achieve the appearance of fading light, of course. But if the cave roof and floor are themselves composed of multiple sloped sectors it becomes very tedious to create light with a natural appearance.

Is there a dynamic light thing for this type of application?

[Graf Zahl]

No. Dynamic lights are only spherical.

[Enjay]

I asked about a more linear or directional dynamic light myself some time ago and Graf explained the difficulties with such a thing to me.

Obviously I haven't seen the particular area you are trying to work with but I guess it will be down to subtle use of multiple smaller dynamic lights. Also, don't forget subtractive lights (essentially placeable darkness - if you haven't used them before). It might be easier to light the cave mouth evenly with sector lighting and place dynamic subtractive lights to darken the area. Possibly a combination of normal and subtractive lights?

I have noticed some minor difficulties with natural slopes and dynamic lights. If carelessly placed, they do tend to show up the many-triangles nature of the slopes.

[Rex Claussen]

This complicates matters, but not terribly so. The way I'll probably handle it is to have a man-made entrance (e.g., wooden beams, concrete walls, etc.) with the natural rock deeper inside. That way I'll be able to deal with the lighting without messing with too many sectors, etc.

Thanks, anyway.

[Rex Claussen]

Update: I did a couple of things:

• 1. Opted for a man-made tunnel-type entrance with beams & concrete.
  2. Used a Thing Type 9800 dynamic light and gave it a z-coordinate value of 4 (i.e., 4 units above the floor) and diameter that is just the width of the tunnel & its opening.
  3. Placed the light thing right at the boundary between the outside sector and inside sector.
  4. Played around with the light value, and ended up with RGB values considerably less than the lighting of the sector outside the tunnel entrance (i.e., outside tunnel entrance = 144, light RGB values = 112, 112, 112). This allows the inside sector to be lighted up without making the outside sector too bright.

This passes off as a reasonable facsimile of "natural" lighting. Perhaps I'll post a screenshot when I get a chance.

[chopkinsca]

This passes off as a reasonable facsimile of "natural" lighting. Perhaps I'll post a screenshot when I get a chance.

I'd like to see a screenshot. I'm a caveaholic and wonder what your method looks like (I just used sector gradients).