Tutorial: Volumetric Lighting Last edited 4 years ago2020-02-21 22:52:30 UTC

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Volumetric lighting, also known as light shafts or god rays, is a lighting effect that can add depth and realism to the visuals of your map.

Creating the effect

First, skew a brush to closely match the angle of your light source. Since the base faces of the brush are meant to be invisible, they should be textured with CONTENTWATER in order to mirror the side faces of the brush, making it more realistic. Lastly, the brush should be an entity, such as func_illusionary, with Render Mode set to Additive. The translucency can be set with FX Amount (1 - 255).

If you use NULL or BLACK_HIDDEN, not all of the side faces will be rendered at the same time, and the effect is invisible from some angles (i.e. inside the volume).

Volumetric lighting, with and without the use of CONTENTWATER

An animated texture could also be used with a func_conveyor entity.

Animated volumetric lighting

Errors

Error: WATER brushes not allowed in detail

This error is caused by any of the following keyvalues in your entity:

zhlt_clipnodedetaillevel
zhlt_detaillevel

Error: mixed face contents

If your brush is textured with CONTENTWATER, then this error is caused by any of the following textures on your brush:

BOUNDINGBOX
CLIP
CLIPBEVEL
CLIPBEVELBRUSH
CLIPHULL1
CLIPHULL2
CLIPHULL3
CONTENTEMPTY
ORIGIN
SKIP

Volumetric lighting textures

Texture	Group
`FADE`	valve/halflife.wad
`FADE2`	valve/halflife.wad
`CULIGHTA`	cstrike/cs_havana.wad
`CXLIGHTA`	cstrike/chateau.wad

2 Comments

Jessie

Commented 4 years ago2020-02-24 22:10:13 UTC Comment #102552

this could probably stand a little more info on exactly what contentwater is. I'm looking at these images and I can't really tell which is which.

Jessie

Commented 4 years ago2020-02-24 22:12:49 UTC Comment #102553

The whole thing could use more explaining and less telling.

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