New to Hammer, quick question

Purple squares are the sign of a missing texture. Odds are those particular ones are semitransparent and where you would normally see shiny reflections. When they occur in the place of reflections, it's a normal step in TF2 mapping. (When your entire floor or wall totally becomes entirely checkerboarded, that's a problem.)

When you first build your map it doesn't have the many small snapshot images that it uses for plausibly-realistic fast reflections. You have to do "buildcubemaps" in the game itself, which will take a bunch of snapshots and overwrite your .bsp with a new version that has them embedded. You get the purple/black checkerboard because they're not generated and embedded yet.

Just do this in console.

• mat_specular 0;
• buildcubemaps;
• mat_specular 1;
• disconnect;
• sv_cheats 1;
• mat_reloadallmaterials

Then reload your map for shiny goodness.

There's more to it in terms of getting really nice and semi-realistic reflections, or working with an HDR map, but that's the basic process.

Cause he never told you to put in one or more env_cubemap entities. These are where the reflections are build from.

What, was it not part of the whatnot?

Yeah, env_cubemap entities define the points where reflection snapshots are taken from. Reflective surfaces will use whichever one is nearest to the player in order to determine what kind of stuff to reflect.

See mah sig for more info :3