Reflective textures Created 17 years ago2007-07-09 20:12:55 UTC by chrispy

Ok, so I thought i had reflective textures nailed, but, apprently not!
I created a pretty basic vtf, basically, just a blue square, slight light to dark gradient. Next, I write my VMT:

"LightmappedGeneric"
{

"$basetexture" "casino/main"
"$surfaceprop" "glass"
"$envmap" "env_cubemap"
"$envmaptint" "[0.8 0.8 1]"

}

For a blue tinted mirror-like reflection.

I texture in hammer, place a cubemap, and then build cube maps once in game. However, it looks matte-like, and nothing like what I expected/hoped.
The effect I am aiming for is that similar to very reflective metal, blue-tinted, as seen on the exterior of a casino I am modelling a map around:[The MonteCito Resort, for the show 'Las Vegas']

Any help here? I know I have been asking for quite a bit of help recently, but if I can get this casino working it will be STUNNING!

I don't believe its possible to create a mirror effect in Source except with water. Cubemapped textures tend to reflect light only and are blurred.

that's a really annoyingly bad tutorial, Habboi.

It doesn't mention if there are any special values to be placed in the .vmt of the texture or anything.

Even so it gives you the texture with the VMT so you can look yourself. Either way less work for me

Near this brush-building in hammer go to properties of env_cubemap entity and shoose resolution 256x256. It helps a lot; if you need more sharp reflections - you need to make custom six-sided vtf image file(six frames in one vtf-file) for reflection (in this case each side limited 2048x2048 pixels resolution; there a lot of tweaks with custom work but all possible).

OK, thing is, I have SEEN near-mirror like textures in source, but under slightly strange circumstances.

I was quite a beginner at mapping, and I rendered the latest version of a map I had made. This was before I understood what a cubemap was, let alone how to use one!
So that map loaded (I think I rendered it in HDR...) and I noticed one area, that was textured in metalgibs/metal_gibs was REALLY shiny. However, it wasn't reflecting the map, it was reflecting the skybox, I assume because there were no cubemaps as reference.

However, I have since revisited said map and the texture is it's usual dull self. It would suggest that, whilst it was actually an error, probably on my part, highly-reflective textures can be obtained without creating preset cubemaps