DM-CMC-Letitia [Chaos Mapping Contest '17]

[nogardilaref]

But you won't see lens flare or coronas with your naked eye. Just because Hollywood upraised it as stylistic device (because they couldn't get rid of that flares ) doesn't mean that lights should have them too look plausible. It's more likely vice versa.

Well, to start with, you can see single lens flares with your naked eye. Just look at any bright light, do you see it all sparkly like a star? That's a flare. Do you even see stars at night all shiny and pointy? You're actually seeing their flares, not the stars themselves.

As for multiple lens flares being generated by a single light source, like the sun for example, while with the naked eye you don't see them (generally), that's still a bad argument, for a very simple reason: you don't actually see anything in a game, movie or otherwise, with your naked eye to start with, because you always use a medium just like movies did, in this case your very screen.
And because you're seeing light sources through a screen rather than your naked eye, unless you do something to the light source itself, visually speaking, you won't ever be able to fully perceive it as a light source, let alone assess its brightness by just looking at it.
Plus, several people use glasses (like me), so those people are able to perceive flares much more often. The same happens if you're in a car, or if you're using some sort of visor, among other similar situations.

You wouldn't be able to tell that the sun is brighter than a light inside a room without spicing it up in some way on your screen. The only way you have to perceive it in RL with your naked eye is because one severally hurts your eye while the other does not, you cannot stare at the sun like you can through a screen, so you immediately intuitively know that it's because it's much brighter.
More recent games do a mix of lens flares and actually blinding your screen if you stare the sun directly, among other things, some of which are possible in UT I believe, by increasing the brightness from the center and decreasing visibility from the sides, in order to simulate your iris closing up like it would do when looking at a bright light source.

And that's also a good reason to avoid them ...if you don't have better solutions.

But I just mentioned one... what do you mean?

[papercoffee]

Thank you Mr. Smartypants.

[makemeunreal]

Which is the best torch/flame texture?
Which one do you like the most?

[nogardilaref]

I think you should opt for the one which looks more "wild" and "alive". I don't use such textures for ages, so I cannot suggest a specific texture reference, but I recall there are some which look too "stable", too boring, and there are others where you can even see stuff falling from the flames, and the latter are the ones you should use imho.
It also depends on the context they are used though.

[makemeunreal]

I've got a feeling that this santorini-theme won't work.

[Terraniux]

I've got a feeling that this santorini-theme won't work.

Don't be afraid of any judging, for the greatest judge is yourself.

Shut up, and keep going! You're doing just fine.

[makemeunreal]

Another WIP area.

[UnrealGGecko]

Not gonna lie, looks beautiful!

[makemeunreal]

I'm glad you like it.

[nogardilaref]

The lighting looks interesting thus far, but the bit which caught my eye were the little small light blue flares on the mosaic at the water level. Am I interpreting them right by saying they are meant to make the mosaic itself look shiny like a jewel, or are they just lights?
Either way, it looks good.

[makemeunreal]

You'll see.
It doesn't look this good ingame, but It's original. Never seen flares used like this in any custom maps so far.

[makemeunreal]

Screenshot have a few darker-than-ingame areas.

[makemeunreal]

I made a very basic edit of the original SkyCity skybox textures to fit the map more. White towers with blue domes.

[nogardilaref]

That's a very neat idea, but it took me a while to be able to perceive them as towers, they looked more as pixel artifacts, as if something was wrong in the image itself.

I think this is because you used very bright colors there, and there doesn't seem to be any shading on them.
So I would suggest to make the towers with half the brightness, or trying to match the brightness of the rest of the texture as closely as possible, and including a couple of lines of shading.

[makemeunreal]

The problem is that those towers are about 2 pixels wide in the original texture. But thanks for the tip.