Basic Jedi Knight Lighting Concepts

Before you can begin you must understand how lighting in Jedi Knight works. When you place a light in JED, and tell it to calculate the lighting, JED sets the amount that each vertex is lit by taking into account the distance from the light, the angle of the surface, and if the light is blocked by another surface.

 The problem with this, is that sometimes a surface could end up not being lit at all, even though a light is right next to it. To see what I mean look at the image to the right, notice how the surface in red is right next to the light source? Now if I were to calculate the lighting in this level, that surface would be completely black. Why? Because the light doesn't touch any of the of the vertices in the surface. How do we remedy this? Most people would just increase the radius of the light, thereby making it reach the vertices in the surface. But instead of doing that, I'm going to cleave the surface vertically, horizontally, and at 45�s so that the lines cross at the lightsource, so that it looks like the image on the left. If I calculate the lighting now, the surface is bright in the center, and fades out to black at the corners like this. But it still looks a little blocky. To fix that, cleave the surfaces so that they end where the lightsource's range intersects the 45� lines, like the image on the right. Now if I recalculate the lighting it looks like this. Notice how the light from the lightsource smoothly fades out to the edges of the surface. Now to finish it up I'll texture it, and add extralight of 0.3 which makes it look like the image to the left.

Things get a little more complex when you have a lightsource that shines on more than one surface, but it is basically the same idea. I will cover how to do this in a later tutorial.

I hope this tutorial gives you some ideas for how to do better lighting in Jedi Knight, later I will be doing a more in-depth continuation of this tutorial which will cover more advanced lighting methods, including shadows.