dark faces on certain brushes ?

Open Blade

L420: High Member
Nov 30, 2007
439
34
Why does a certain face of a brush become super dark, even though there is sufficient light to the face (and no, there is no leak). Take a look at the screenshot. The angled piece next to the track is acting like there is no light getting to it, yet on every brush next to it, the light is getting to those faces just fine. Why is that?

blackface.jpg
 

Nineaxis

Quack Doctor
aa
May 19, 2008
1,767
2,820
Alt+P, see if there are any errors related to that face.

If not, it might just be VRAD being silly again.
 

YM

LVL100 YM
aa
Dec 5, 2007
7,135
6,056
It will be because more than 50% of that face's lightmap is recieving no light. if you have a brush that is only 1 unit wide with a lightmapscale of 16, it still calculate's that face's light based off a 16 by 16 square. if the majoritiy of that sqaure is hidden from light, the thin brush is dark, if however the majority of the sqaure is in light it make the brush's face light.

My suggested fix: try making the lightmap scale smaller on that one face only, try 12. since it's just a small face an increase in lightmap density wont harm your filesize.
 

Open Blade

L420: High Member
Nov 30, 2007
439
34
It will be because more than 50% of that face's lightmap is recieving no light. if you have a brush that is only 1 unit wide with a lightmapscale of 16, it still calculate's that face's light based off a 16 by 16 square. if the majoritiy of that sqaure is hidden from light, the thin brush is dark, if however the majority of the sqaure is in light it make the brush's face light.

My suggested fix: try making the lightmap scale smaller on that one face only, try 12. since it's just a small face an increase in lightmap density wont harm your filesize.

That makes sense. That face never had a problem before but I recently raised the displacement up on the other side of it, which I'm sure now makes the area showing above the displacement less then 50%.

No, it's not the final lighting. I'm still going back and forth on what skybox I want to use. Just tried out Gravel and it doesn't go at all. Well, it does look good in some areas but parts of the 3D skybox look horrible with that texture. I think I'm gonna try Hyrdo but Goldrush did look pretty good. I really wanted a skybox with HDR and at Valves site, the only TF2 skybox with HDR values was Gravel. I don't understand why at the top they would say all of them are HDR compatible but yet only give HDR values for Gravelpit. Go figure.
 

zornor

L4: Comfortable Member
Jan 14, 2009
195
23
judging from the quality of your map thus far this probably isn't likely but I'm going to throw this in: make sure you didn't use a model texture D:
 

Void

Local Man Unable To Map, Sources Say
aa
Sep 14, 2008
1,865
2,972
judging from the quality of your map thus far this probably isn't likely but I'm going to throw this in: make sure you didn't use a model texture D:

The only thing more impossible than outsmarting bullet, is using a model texture, as they no longer exist.