Giant X on my carpet

[electroglyph]

Ok, I tried making a texture, and applying it as a projection light, but it just didn't look natural (it's hard to make it look like the light is coming from the windows, or at least make it look like it's being lighted realistically. I also tried adding only a few spot lights, but the problem, is there there's a big bulge of light in certain areas, that, realistically, could only be there if there was a light source right in the middle of it. So... any more suggestions?

It all depends on what you mean by natural. You don't have transmission with the technique you are trying. By that I mean you do not have white lights shining through the glass picking up each color. You seem to have colored lights outside and are just picking up the shapes of the windows.

To get what you want with a light texture and get rid of the bulge try editing the lamp. With the spot selected click the shading button.
You should see Preview, Lamp, Shadow and Spot, Texture....etc.
In the Lamp section the Dist will default to 20. This is the blender distance where the lamp is half as bright. Crank this up to increase the distance the light will throw before fading. You can also adjust Quad 1 to affect the linear attenuation( Distance) and quad 2 to affect the quadratic attenuation (Fade at the edges) of the lamp. You should be able to increase these and decrease the intensity of the lamp until you get a more natural fade.

The other solution is to do this completey out of blender as layers in photoshop.

[electroglyph]

Oops! never mind what I said before. I stole your textures from the image you posted for a quick trial. If you use a bank of windows as a texture for the light it fans out from the center of the image. If you correct the angle and fall off you wind up with just square lights.



I'm guessing you want every pane of glass to fan out individually like it was it's own light source. To do that you are going to have to create a gel and light for each individual pane of glass.

[electroglyph]

Remember that Plasma can only have 8 lamps affect a single object at once. Your best bet would be to make a texture and apply it as a projection lamp.

You could do this with 5 lights. Create a duplicate texture of each wall. Create another texture with spots for each of the 9 ceiling lights you have in your image. Position 5 spots and attach textures as shown. Note that the east and west spots have the image rotated 90 degrees.



This is really just to make the lights appear on the avitar. If you try to export a room with 50 lights even if it works it will slow gameplay down to a crawl. For the floor texture I'd render that in Bryce where you can have 255 lights then import it.