realistic spotlight source Created 15 years ago2009-03-13 06:20:48 UTC by Captain Terror

what i'm using:

func_dustmotes
point spotlight
small texlight on the end of the light source(parcan prop)
hdr [on] off

the parcan prop and point_spotlight are set about 125 units off the floor. Every thing looks fairly ok, except the floor below is totally black, where there realistically should be a circularish pattern of light. Things i've tried to do to fix with no success:

-placed a small point light at the floor
-made a cylinder textured with nodraw on all sides except the face facing the floor, which is textured with a textlight.

plus other things i can't remember. seriously, i've wasted 2 hours trying to get this very simple effect to look right and it's pissing me off. I could do this in goldsource in about 1.5 minutes using a fade texture, sprites, and texture lighting... Here's a pic of my current lack of progress:Here's the map if you want to check it out!

Lighting in general seems a lot harder in source... i've wasted days of editing time just running simple test maps trying to get the stupidest things to work... fails hard i do... =,(

Have you given using a light_spot instead of a texlight a try? Spotlights are wayyy more versitile and look a hell of a lot better, so if you can learn to use them, you'll have a lot more flexibility. Plus, to my knowledge, they don't cause this problem.

Yeah, you'll definately want to replace the point light with a light_spot, that way any models you insert will be more accurately lit too. As for the point_spotlight, you should first make sure the dynamic light is off as it's too resource taxing for a simple light (check the flags).

It also helps to have a small, faint light right next to the light source too, to cast a little radial light around there and avoid ugly darkness near the light source.

You want the beam to look like it matches with the coverage of the world lighting, so you should set the thickness up a bit and shorten the distance in it's properties. You'd want it to look something like this:

ok but what do you think about casting a circular light cone on the stage below the light, like this(like my flashlight lol):I've tried loads of things and the stage below shows full black no matter what i do.

I'm also trying to adjust the "maximum distance" to control how far the light "bleeds" to other parts of the map, but that attribute doesn't seem to work?

edit: it works on the floor(to the right), but the same setup over the stage shows completely black:Anyone know why, or what i can do to make the spotlight over the stage look like the one on the right?

edit x2: i changed the texture on the stage to the same on on the floor, and now they look the same. different textures react to light differently?!

edit x3: And finally the whole time i was trying to get the light to leave shine/reflect off the floor, the only thing i needed to do was change to a different texture:Fuck me, how infuriating. Is there a way to tell in the editor how textures will react to light before you compile?!

Make sure you aren't using any models textures as they are vertex-lit and not lightmap-lit like world surfaces need to be; also make sure that if a texture is reflective that you have cubemaps placed in the map and that they are built before you test out the map; otherwise reflective surfaces and models will reflect their surroundings incorrectly.

oh crap you're right, i double checked and the original stage texture was a model texture! I thought i was careful about not using non-world textures on world brushes, but i obviously wasn't careful enough, meh.

Thanks people for your help so far! = )