This tutorial will cover how to add enhanced light effects, including light beams, to light entities in a level inside Crytek's Sandbox2. These can really enhance the atmospheric feel of lights in a map, and will create some really effective visuals to make players stop and look at the lighting.
First off, the entire scene needs to be lit as desired. Once the light model has been picked (these can be found in Brush/Library/Lights), spawn a SimpleLight entity from the RollupBar.
Once this is done, place the entity directly inside where the source of the light would be (i.e the bulb). You'll need to make sure that the bulb isn't casting shadows in its entity parameters in the rollupbar otherwise the light will be blocked. If it's not possible to single out the bulb and stop it from casting shadows, simply place the light underneath the light source.
There are a number of parameters that can be configured in a light entity to enhance the look of your light. More in depth information on what each parameter does can be found in the CryWiki Light Entities article, however shown below are a good choice of parameters that I have used in my levels.
Once you have lit the scene as you would like it, it's now time to move on to adding the eye candy for the light entity.
In order to add a beam whilst keeping the area lit as you set out earlier, we're going to create another light. Perform the same step as before to spawn this light. To create the light beam, we need to assign a texture and a material to the light. The texture can be applied by clicking on the "Texture" parameter, clicking on the yellow browse button in this parameter, and choosing a texture. In this case we're going to pick the tunnel_light.dds found in game/textures/lights.
Next up, we need to choose the material. Select the light, press M to open up the Material Editor, and browse to the Materials/Lightbeams folder. I'm going to choose the lightbeam_floodlight.dds texture, but as you can see many others are available. Finally, click the Assign Material to Selection button (shown in the top left corner of the image below).
You will now have a light beam! In order to create the best looking effect, it is recommended to play around with the parameters again, as the lightbeam can look vastly different under varying settings. Remember to set the radius of the light so that the beam reaches below the ground, as a lightbeam stopping in mid-air is often very unrealistic. Shown below are the recommended parameters I used for my light beam.
There are also added effects that you can apply to the light and its surroundings that greatly increase the atmoshpere. I have covered a few of these below.
Light glare on the camera or the eye is a common effect in real life, and can be mimicked inside a Crysis level with a simple particle effect. Navigate to the Particles tab in the Database View (which can be accessed by going to View/Open View Pane/Database View), and then find the "mine_light" particle situated in the "runway_light" folder.
Drag the particle out from the Database and place it directly on top of the light source, as shown in the image below.
As well as particle placement, you can create varying light styles for your lights. What this means is that you can create anything from pulsing lights to flickering ones, with over 30 different styles of light. Experiment around with the parameter, which can be found in the light entities entity parameters. With all this and more, you can quite easily achieve an effect like the one below in minutes.
