importing light colour and brightness?

[lauris47]

Hi, is it possible to import CS:GO light colour and brightness to 3Ds Max? I see that lights are successfully tr transfered, however brightness and colour do not match across Hammer editor and 3Ds Max.

Thank you.

[wallworm]

The colors have always matched for me in all imports. Do you have WW properly configured with CSGO (the FGD pointing to the csgo.fgd in global WW settings)?

Note that in WW, the color implementation is broken into a color picker followed by a brightness spinner.

[lauris47]

As always, thank you for your reply.

I imported FGD file from counter strike, inside WW settings. Other settings are auto configured from cfg file of counter strike as well.

I compared lighting settings (brighness and color) in Hammer editor and 3ds max again, and all lights are one colour and same brightness anyway.
So it does not work.


I noticed that Valve keeps the brightness inside alpha channel of the color, which is smart. In 3ds Max and Maya, brightness is a separate entity.


Do you have any other suggestions?

Thank you.

[wallworm]

I will need to investigate. The colors and settings are always working for me so I will need to have more info and look into it.

* What version of Max (and what service packs).
* What version of WW
* WW Free or WW Pro

[lauris47]

Thanks.

3Ds Max 2019. 21.0 -21.0.0.845
I also tried 2018 version, same result.

WW is Free version, 4.0.24

[lauris47]

Hi, any update on this matter?

Thank you.

[wallworm]

Sorry I took so long to respond. I've been away from my office a lot in the last month.

I haven't got an update for you yet as it's not a problem I'm ever seeing. We may need to do a screen share at some point to get to the bottom of this faster. Contact me via Discord and we will arrange a time. The WW discord channel is accessible via the WW > WW Online > Wall Worm Discord menu in Max.

[lauris47]

Thank you, we figured out that we can read vmf file and get light information from there.
Angles and position were with an offset, so we used transforms from WW and other information from VMF file directly.

However, we still need to figure out offsets of intensity and radius of lights, because Source, 3ds max or Maya and Unity light systems are not the same, hence values cannot be exactly the same.

But somehow I feel that there will be no direct conversion, therefore I will use some scalar for light intensity and radius to get approximate result (Source to Unity).

[wallworm]

OK, maybe I now understand what you are talking about.

If you are using actual entities inside Max (so created the light via the Point Entity rollout) then you will see the actual Source Engine properties for the light in the Entity Properties rollout. Those will have a 1-to-1 conversion from Max to Source. So you should use this method for the lights and set the values via the Entity Rollout. You will see that for the Color pickier in that rollout there is an intensity spinner below the color.

When setting this value, the native light multiplier will automatically update to mimic what the values should be inside Max (for rendering in Max). Note that because the units are different, to get an expected value you should set the global setting for Light Multiplier in Level Design Settings (global setting) to a value that makes Max light units match Source. You may find this value should be 20 or 200... so you will need to experiment some.

For lights that are not tied to entities, the brightness value will always be the light's light multiplier times the global light multiplier setting. Note, however, that the light multiplier is actually saved in the VMF export settings so if you export once now you will need to change the VMF Export light multiplier setting. (This ensures that different users exporting the same scene with different global settings will still export the same light values for lights not tied to entities).

[lauris47]

Thank you very much, I will look into it!