Need help with making a doorway light

[Sammy]

Hey guys,
I am making a 2D RPG game. Been trying to make a doorway light for inside of the houses, but I failed! Any suggestions on how to make a better light? I want to show the sun is high above the area and it's an afternoon day time. But it's not shining in directly.

Thanks in advance! 

This is what I made:

[Xorceles]

your light is not hand made you must make kit not render or use brushed with anti-aliasing
here a humble example:

[MysteryMeat]

all the poster above does make a good point, it's not always true that you have to do it by hand and in fact May sometimes be worse for the finished piece to do so.

it really depends entirely on the kind of environment you're trying to make here, is this a regular room in a house? Some kind of giant Stone Affair? Some kind of cave? All of this can affect how the scene is lit.

[Xorceles]

i refer if he is trying to make an entrance he should make it at hand or computer aided not using brushes that are not related to pixel art.
this map start in pixels and end with anti-aliased brushes the question he is making a pixel art map or digital art map? cuz it look like  pixel art mixed with digital art

[Zanorin]

I have to disagree, mixing pixel art and "digital art" can be difficult, but if done well it can look great.

[MysteryMeat]

what he said. Purists are nerds who are not to be listened to because they discard out of hand techniques that may in fact be usable and useful purely for the sake of being... Pure.

case in point, rotoscoping. great way to.rough out animations without them looking total garbage.

try to play around with what you can get out of this, do try to make it match the resolution of the image so you don't have pixel size mixing like that.


also, it is perhaps a bit out of the ordinary to criticize one of the critics, but as it will help both parties I shall do so:

your gradient is very stark white and doesn't really transition well into the floor color.
there are some kind of cheating ways you can get around this through things like cross hatching but ideally you want to have each color slowly gravitate towards the other in the color wheel each step.

you should also let the contrast in the colors be a bit more visible, and perhaps use some scattering in between these layers of light to create a smoother transition.

as it is, the edit looks more like a marble staircase than a light source.

[Retronator]

I gave a crack at this because I love lighting situations. I approached it from a physically correct perspective, which is not always what makes the best stylization, but here's my reasoning process for determining lighting like here. I'll add that this was quite a difficult study (as soft light sources tend to be compared to hard light) and I'm far from happy with the result. I feel like I could be quite off. For a proper study I'd model this in 3D, but I wanted to do some sketching so you get just my best guesswork.



The top image shows the assumed lighting: the sun is high, but from behind the building so no direct sunlight is actually going into the building. Therefore, no hard light directional light sources inside the building. All you have is the sky, which is the blue wavelengths of sun rays that got scattered through the atmosphere. For an early afternoon situation I'll just assume it's radiating equally blue from all top half hemisphere.

Now, to determine how bright any spot in the scene will be, you have to imagine you're in that spot and looking around you, 360 degrees. And then the bigger part of your field of view where you will see the sky, the brighter that spot will be. So if you sit right at the door on the floor (imagine you're an ant), all your view in front of you will be the sky. As you go more and more back into the building, the wall is starting to obstruct your view of the sky, so less skylight is shining to that location. So the more you go back, the less light you get through the door. At the very far end of the room the door covers a tiny fraction of your view, but it still covers some—it isn't going to be completely dark/unaffected. In your take the light basically affects just a tiny area around the door where in fact the light will gradually fall off towards the very far end. It falls off quickly at the start and then slower and slower.

I also played around with windows a bit, where the situation is similar, except that as you get close to the bottom of the windows you again get in shadow since you can't really see much of the opening of the window if you're an ant right underneath. So it also fades toward the front wall.

Here's my attempt at lighting the room (just the door) with all this in mind:



It's relatively correct, although, like I said, doesn't immediately translate well to a pixel art scene. But if you look at real photos of lighting situations like this, you'll see that the general idea is correct.



How to stylize this best for pixel art? Well, that's a different issue. It really depends on your graphics engine/palette/art style limitations. What I can say is that the gradient will be easier to produce (or mask), even with a limited palette, if you have textures in place. Then you can gradually step down your ramp, for example, as you transition from plank to plank (if it's a hardwood floor). If not, the best you can do is to just have a very bright ambient light and only do a small gradient right next to doors/windows. That's what you'd usually see in a tile-based top-down RPG.

Very rudimentary example of the concept:



Again, when textures and items are in place, this would look better. Like here in Crossing Souls:

[Indigo]

Great feedback, Retronator.  Featuring this post

[Sammy]

Thanks a lot for your help and feedback, guys! I really appreciate the time you took to help me with your great suggestions I read each comment a couple times to make sure I get it properly.

So here's what I made. I added some of the environment sprites to get the sense of the scene:


Is it better, or worse? Any suggestions to make it better?

[eishiya]

Don't forget that the light coming from the door is just regular light. It doesn't get into cracks any better than the interior light, so it shouldn't lighten the gaps between the boards so much.

I also don't recommend using white as your light colour. Light picks up the colours around it, and plus white/grey just look boring. You can get a more interesting look if you give the light a hue.


What is the light from the window? By that I mean, is it the wood lit up by the light from the window, or is it god-rays (dust/particles in the air lit up by the light)? If it's the light lighting up the wood where it hits, then the wall and floor right by the wall should not be lit up, because the light from the window can't reach there. If it's a god-ray, then it should stream from the entire window, not just the bottom of it. If you don't understand what I mean, here's a photo of light from windows illuminating the floor, and here's a photo of god rays from windows (with bonus illumination of the floor, because that's hard to avoid with direct sunlight). Be careful with light rays though, as they can give the place a dusty or humid look, which isn't always what you want. Sometimes it's better to just give the window a faint glow and not include any directional light.