Battlefield Modding Tutorials BFMODS

I just got done redoing the lightmaps for this map with a more accurate sun light direction. The result is quite a sight: (click to enlarge)






The map is now a bit darker in places. But I like this. It's more realistic. The sky shows a sun that's either about to set soon or is still at Dawn. Plus its cloudy out as you can see. The lightmaps were done at large setting so most of them are 512x512 in size. So this means the shadows have better detail.

The interiors lost the neat lighting from the ceiling light fixtures and such so I didn't replace those. The interior still looks the same as stock DC map. But the interior was nicely done to begin with so there is no loss at not redoing them. I'm still trying to figure out how the DC makers got the little cieling lights to light up the interiors. They didn't do that when I did the new light maps....odd.

What do you think?

If you like it and want it for your mod, here's the download link:

http://www.filefront.com/14559323/DCSea ... htMaps.rar

Extract the light maps and put them in to transform the map!

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I have cameras in your head!

Very nicely done...it looks a lot more real, thats for sure. Looking at those the only negative is the skybox/1942 fog.

Nice work dood!!

That's something I also noticed during my map retexture undertakings.

Altering the sun height (most BF maps have an almost midday sun) and an increase in shadow "darkening" can enhance the immersion vastly by simple means. I usually try to combine moving the sun closer to the horizon and thus having better object lightmaps with better lighting during texturing of the terrain itself (Editor 42: Ambient 0.2, Sun 0.8) which supports that immersion greatly.

How did you make BF generate 512x512 OLM? That's something I think would really increase the quality a lot, as with 256x256 you easily can spot the shadow "pixels" . And I strongly doubt it would mean a high perfomance impact on nowadays computer rigs, right?

Oh, and is there a way to force BF to generate higher quality terrain lightmaps too? I never quite figured that procedure out. Even if you set it to "perfect" in BC42, the rendered shadows are chubby and pixelated (best example: render shadows for a single palm...) which kinda sucks, especially if you use HD terrain texturing...

And last but not least, is it possible to enhance the "real time" shadow rendering quality of BF? I mean the dynamic shadows e.g. soldiers and vehicles cast on the ground? I once looked, but never found a proper parameter which got that working...

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If a map has a lot of statics in it (like the Baghdad map in my mod), using Large for light maps will lag. However small maps and medium sized maps shouldn't see a hit in performance from it. (unless you maybe got a video card with lots of ram that 900+ statics with 200MB worth of Light map files would run good on! )

You will have to regenerate all the sample files to large so that the game will make larger light maps. you will have to do this with all meshes that you intend to light map. This is not something that can be done in BC42 like with terrain shadow quality. Making new samples is done with samplesmaker a command line program. Light map TGAs don't use RLE Compression either. So 512x512 res TGAs will be 256kb each.

As for terrain shadows, you can increase terrain shadow by decreasing pixel size. But if you said you told BC42 to use the highest quality setting, chances are that's the best it's going to get. The shadow LGT TGA files generated during terrain shadow making is at 1024x1024 and never higher or lower. If your doing higher quality textures that are at higher resolutions then that, then terrain shadows won't be able to match up in quality.

There's no way of changing the quality of dynamic shadows.Sorry.

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I have cameras in your head!