Hello,
I'm working on a very dim lighted enviroment-map, so I need the shadows to be perfect. So first I tried to build everything with brushes. (woods, supports and etc) The results;
LightMappedGeneric (with brushes)
http://i.imgur.com/9iygeNa.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/L5QL3x3.jpg
It looked very nice (lighting-wise). However, the compile times were very long and those steel-supports are displacements, so I thought perhaps I should try to optimize it a bit and use models instead of these crowded brushes and displacements.
And here are the results with the static_props version;
VertextLitGeneric (obviously with models)
http://i.imgur.com/BXapfJu.jpg
Each support is a model, each line of set of wooden planks on top of the supports is a another model. But unfortunately, the lighting is far from good.. it is actually weird, the wooden planks are not lit at all. So I went to the Advanced Lighting section of ValveDeveloperWiki. Recompiled the map with, -staticproplighting and -staticproppolys with HDR enabled. The results were the same. I tried everything to fix it, searched some forums.. and I could not find a viable solution to it.
So my questions are, how can I fix the lighting issue with prop_statics? What am I doing wrong while compiling? Or should I stick to the brushes with LightMappedGeneric?