I was hoping to get some decent lighting in my contest entry. Some people recommended the lighter plugin. I don't understand how to use it. It looks like I'm supposed to place lights in Jed first, but all it does is cleave up all the surrounding surfaces before calculating lighting. I must be doing something wrong -- I still get the crazy crap where a bunch of surfaces will be completely black. Is there a good way to simulate "daylight" on a "sunny" day where I just have to place "the sun" and then be done with it? I tried placing a light with a long range (100) at the very top but I still end up with a zillion completely black surfaces. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm also not a big fan of how it cuts up all my surfaces -- but is this the whole point of the plugin?

Also, I tried placing 4 lights and running the plugin, and it's eating up my cpu and all the Jed windows froze.

Yeah. Using the lighter with too many large lights will crash ZED, because of all the cleaving required. Split them up into layers and run them individually.

The best way to simulate ambient lighting and ridding you of the black shadows, is to set all sectors extra light values to something like 0.3 or so. Alternatively, the latest lighter plugin allows you to set ambient lighting. Set it to 0.3 or so, and it will automatically fix the darkness issues, so that you won't have to change sector extra lights, but both work fine.

Anyways, yes, the point of the plugin is to cleave shadows into surfaces to guide the vertex lighting.

Good pointers are to never save the level after running the lighter if you don't think the level is complete and always backup a non-lighter version of your level just in case you muck-up. Re-texturing or modifying a level after having run the plugin is hell, so I strongly advise following the above pointers.

Thanks for the tips. I tried the ambient light setting and it helped a lot. I like how the shadows look while checking the "as 3do" box. Is there something wrong with doing that?

I don't think so, I think it just lights angled surfaces.

Keep in mind that the results in JED can be different than ingame.

The "3do style" lighting simply makes surfaces facing the light brighter than those facing away. Without this, all shadowed surfaces will be of the same darkness.

The only thing "wrong" with doing that is that it crashes JED/ZED when using too many lights. You can run the lighter on more lights simultaneously without crashing if it's off.

I've always got the Lighter plugin to crash, provide horrible results or just about anything in-between. The structure on the left side of this screenshot is about the only successful Lighter thing I have.

I found that once I figured out how it was supposed to work, it works ok. Certainly a lot more efficient than doing it by hand (for me, I fail at lighting). I did it on an outdoorsy area. I will be doing more indoor and less natural features soon and I'll post here how it went.