Reflective/Shiny textures? Created 18 years ago2006-01-12 22:37:01 UTC by Guinea Pirate

How do I get reflective or shiny textures? Is there certain ones I must use or are there more steps I must take?

There are certain textures with reflective properties, and you must use them with an env_cubemap entity in order to get the real reflection (instead of textures reflecting only the sky)
Type buildcubemaps in the console in order to generate the reflections while in game.
As for which textures are shiny, I dont know if there's a way of telling beforehand. Most of the combine textures of HL2 are shiny, for example.

Actually, I've noticed that if you've got a decent enough graphics card, shiny textures will appear shiny in Hammer. Hammer applies a default cubemap to textures automatically, so it should give you an indication of what's shiny and what isn't.

Even in Hammer? Wow, I've never noticed that before.

Yeah, might've been a recent addition (seeing as the normal maps seem to be working a lot better in HL2 than they used to) because I've noticed it on water textures, metalic surfaces as well as my own custom textures that I've added reflexivity to.

Ive noticed that certain textures do shine in Hammer but I only noticed on the maps that came with it.

So do reflective textures have a certain label?

Don't think so.