Funky Lighting Problem Created 18 years ago2005-09-29 23:38:27 UTC by [VDC] Rad Brad

I am having a problem with the way a few brushes are lit in my map. What I have is a taller building that has a few decks in it. The second deck up has a hole in the wall for bringing in supplies... picture it like a barn... big doors and above it, another door. And above that deck is a third deck. They are smaller brushes... maybe 256x96. Also the doors are open. The pavement outside and inside the building are a whitish texutre. There is water nearby, behind you, in this view, and also some water inside the building. The building is a boat maintanence building with a water bay for small boats inside it. Hopefully, you can picture that.

Now, here's the problem. As you approach the large doors, you can see inside, through the doors and also through the hole above the door. Essentially, you can see the bottoms of the decks. They are lit like they are in a fullbright map, though that's not the case. Once you get inside the doors, the lighted textures on the bottom of the decks fade to dark shades of the texture, which makes sense, since you've come inside, where it's darker. Alot of times, they don't darken up right away and sometimes, deep inside the building, they spring back to fullbright, if you move just right. These three brushes are the only three inside that do that, and only on the bottom. I have changed the lightmap scale to 8 on this with no noticeable effect. I have placed cubemaps under the textures and drew the cubemap from the texture (not sure if this was correct) and that didn't help or hurt anything.

I'm sure that there is a ton of light bouncing around at that spot, reflected off the water and off the cement texture. Should I split the floor brush along the building wall and make the interior texture different? Do that and grab the cube's map from the new floor texutre? While there are a ton of tutorials out there, there really isn't any kind of lighting (or modeling, for that matter) troubleshooting guides and, frankly, I'm stumped. Thanks in advance.

By the way, what is the invisibleladder texture for?

I think this usually happens when you try to use a model texture on a world surface.

well, it is a model texture. (Why do they even put them in as choices, eh?) I will change it and see what happens. Thank you!

Fixed!!! Yes! Thanks, Seventh!

Here's a screenshot of the map. It's in the rough, but coming along....

I'd say, filtering out models texture in Hammer would be a smart thing indeed. Why they didn't do it? No idea...

Anyway, that map looks a bit standard lighted. Not really realistic, it's too dim for that and there's no really interesting shadows yet.
Other than that, it looks like a good start and it's not hard to see what theme you chose.
Good luck with this one!

I'm not sure, but perhaps the models require their materials to be cached when you load up Hammer, so you don't end up with a bunch of non-textured models. D: - That would be my only guess why.

There's an option to exclude material directories, but it doesn't choose from a GCF file source, so you have to extract the materials, and then it's just kind of redundant and doesn't do anything.

Invisibleladder doesn't seem useful for anything. I think it's kind of obsolete with the new ladder system.

I'm sure it wasn't in the original intent, but you can export a prefab with model textures, import it into XSI and export it to an SMD to compile a model!

How's that for obscure!

Sweet, so you can easily model-ify brushwork?

Heh... it really is a map in the rough. Just the big ticket items, so far. And the light has been turned way down trying to compensate for the model texture I had.

And thanks for the comments!

so you can easily model-ify brushwork?

Yep.. http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Converting_brush_structures_in_your_map_into_a_prop_static_with_XSI_Mod_Tool

Not sure how useful it is, but it can be done.