Lighting guidelines and tricks

Hi all,

I'm in the process of building my first base, and I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the different lighting options.

Do you use any personal rules about room light position/colour?

Have you found cool ways to combine room lighting with spotlights or lamps?

Have you discovered any neat-o tricks or effects you can create with lighting?

I've been playing this game for years, and I had no idea the base construction system was so deep and flexible, despite it's limitations. I'm loving this game-within-the-game. I could spend hours just re-positioning my TP beacons

Enough about me. On with the lighting discussion!

Many answers to the above questions can be found in my (old) SG Base Tours via screenshots that you can see in my sig. The original 8x8 plot base was built in the days of Raid Pathing where you couldn't imbed objects into other objects. The later tour was done after Raid Pathing was eliminated, so imbedding objects into other objects was now permitted.

These days, I prefer to do embedded lighting and leave the Room Lighting dialed all the way down to Black (high-middle-low) so as to be able to control the lighting in rooms to the maximum extent possible.

If you'd like a tour of my SG base as it currently exists (now on a 16x16 plot), contact me on Virtue Blueside and prepare yourself for amazement at what lighting (by using Lights) can do to the atmospherics and sense of "vastness of space" inside rooms.

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

The thing about using general room lighting is that it also colors the items in a room.

I like to use it as part of my color scheme. I will often put a darker color at the top of a room, and pick either complimentary colors or lighten the same color down through the middle and floor of the room.

Depending on the room, I also like to embed lights, to give a glow without the glare of the item. Different light items also give out different hues and levels of lighting.

I think lighting is one of those wonderful tools that can really give a room/base that final sense of "polish". Have fun with it!


** I'll see if I can drum up some screenies for demonstration.

Okay... so a lot of the examples I was thinking of using are from my club room, which I posted pictures of HERE You should be able to see several examples of directional and embedded lighting in those pics.

But here are a few more (click on thumbnails for larger images), demonstrating stratified ambient lighting. All those pictures in that other post are in the same room!

Here you can see what my lighting choices are for the room;
The ambient lighting is mostly blue and purple, except for the topmost, which I left uncolored, but very dark. Even so, you can still pick up some "bleed" from the lower levels. I overcame the darkness, and the bleed in the upper level by utilizing the directional light from various lamps.



And speaking of directional lighting, I actually spent a lot of time deciding on the direction of the spotlights around the dancefloor. I wanted the splashes of light to be balanced and somewhat realistic, including a splash of lighting on the (monstrous) dj station.



These next ones are from a different base, more "magical" and whimsical.
Here you can see the effects that the stratified lighting has on the items in the room. The higher up they are, they reflect the dark blue, the lower items reflect the purple/pink and sienna gold/brown. This is when it becomes important to chose lighting colors that will work well together.



I like to color code my bases with ambient lighting. See that green room? That's the infirmary... and it was a pain in the a-- tukus.



Here's the reason I had such a bi-- heck of a time with it... the banners.
See, the green lighting really made the green health banner pop, it was great. But it completely washed out the other banners with their blues and pinks.

So I fiddled, and faddled, and swore up and down, and frightened the cats in the process.
Until I finally had the right idea.
Paint the walls.
duh

So, I painted the walls a faint green, which was amplified by the very muted ambient (teal) light on the top level. BTW, just because you have the light level set to the darkest point, if it is colored it will have an effect.
Then I left the mid light layer uncolored. Which allowed my banners to retain *most* of their natural color.
I say *most* because ambient lighting is designed to blend between levels... it's just the way it works. So the banners are still very slightly affected by the upper and lower lighting colors.



Still, it works for this particular base, and at least the cats have since forgiven me.
.