staticproplighting issues

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,694
2,579
So this is my first experience with -staticproplighting, and for the most part I'm loving it. My ladders would be completely unusable without it, for one thing. But it is producing a decent share of weirdness. For example:

artpassstevethepocketbu.jpg

I am totally stumped as to what would be casting this shadow. There is literally nothing between the pipe and the light fixture right above it.

artpassstevethepocketbul.jpg

For these light bulbs I tried placing a light entity and putting a circular block_light brush around the rim, like in Doublecross. And it ... almost worked.

Any idea how to fix these?
 

YM

LVL100 YM
aa
Dec 5, 2007
7,135
6,056
Where is the light ent for the first pic? above or below the cage of the light? If you're using -staticproppolys then putting the light above the cage will result in a small shadow from the cage, and thus dark spots on any dense meshes below.

In the last scenario I like to turn vertex lighting off for that one prop (the bottom three options of any static prop, just read what it says and they're fairly obvious, "disable vertex lighting" or something) and use a point light just below the bulb. Alternatively I once used a spotlight inside the prop, making sure that the cone ONLY covered the bulb section and disabled shadows on that one prop (leaving vertex lighting on) this way the bulb polys are lit since they're in the light_spot's cone and the base of the bulb isn't since it's behind it. This method relies a lot more on bounce lighting to hit the ceiling though.

I have my lightbulb props prefabed since it's hard to remember exactly which options to use every time I want to use one.
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
aa
Nov 2, 2007
4,775
7,669
One of the "advanced" VRAD compile parameters that are actually pretty much standard with Orange Box and later. It creates per-vertex lighting for all static props that don't have it turned off in their properties.

The other two that should always be used are staticproppolys and textureshadows.

See here: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Vrad