Making rooms 'warm' - Lighting and Shading

[Sythe]

Well I was playing Yahtzees new game earlier today and having a good time of it too

But I was also taking notes on how Yahtzee achieved various effects. One of the most notable things was that nearly every room, even the outside areas, had some sort of radiating light source. But they weren't correct lights which cast hard shadows; rather they just made the room feel less ... well less ms-painted to be frank.

Take the below example:



This is your average mspaint room. And for the most part its not too bad but it feels cold and lifeless.



The image featured in my little program here on the other hand has some depth and life to it. It's more in the yahtzee style.

Anyway so as you've already guessed I wrote a little vb program to do radial luminescence gradients. You can add as many as you want to the same image. The above one has 4 but they overlap somewhat.

http://www.sythe.org/radialshader.zip

I wrote it to help me with some of my more boring rooms in a game I'm working on. But I decided to post it just for the hell of it. Someone will probably find a use for it.

The picture box control was pissing me off so I've left it how it is â€" that is to say it saves your images a little bit bigger than they were originally with some grey space padding them. I'm sure you can just crop it in paint if need be.

[DoorKnobHandle]

That sure is a nice program, but it is going to make your rooms look as good as if you used a lens-flare filter everywhere. Really, the key to great looking rooms is (a) correct perspective, (b) solid texturing/shading, (c) details and (d) shadows.

[Anarcho]

dkh is right.  You've got the right idea, but using a filter like that makes the image look flat and distorted.  Light wouldn't look like it's a perfect circle on every surface.  You're always going to get better results by drawing it by hand.