Help ! (Need Custom Fire Glowing Texture/Material) or any other way of faking fire

TheONE

L1: Registered
Jan 12, 2013
26
1
Hey guys,

I have low experience in making custom textures/materials !, and what I am asking is a bit challenging! so I need your HELP ! :confused:

The basic idea is to avoid adding either "particles" or "sprites" or anything that consume engine ents (cuz i have already lots in my map)


and I need to make fire lights for an area in my map ... I was wondering if there is a way to make fire without consuming engine ents!

one way of doing that which is the closest thing to fire is a glowing texture/material that looks like fire (not lava !).


another -worst case scenario- way is having small orange glowing cubes.... but the problem i need someone to help me make orange glowing texture/material !

your help on this issue is much appreciated ! :)
 

Fantaboi

Gone and one day forgotten
aa
Mar 11, 2013
892
1,050
What's the problem with having too many engine ents? Just curious.
 
T

The Asylum

What's the problem with having too many engine ents? Just curious.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Entity_limit

For reasons of memory allocation, there is a limit to the number of entities Source can manage at once.

...

There can be up to 4096 entities. This total is split into two groups of 2048:

Non-networked entities, which exist only on the client or server (e.g. death ragdolls on client, logicals on server).
Entities with associated edicts, which can cross the client/server divide.

If the game tries to assign a 2049th edict it will exit with an error message, but if it tries to create a 2049th non-networked entity it will merely refuse and print a warning to the console. The logic behind this may be that an entity spawned dynamically (i.e. not present in the map) but not assigned an edict probably isn't too important.

...

Hammer itself has no entity limit, but VBSP's is 8192. This is double the combined total accepted by the engine, which may be because it at first treats internal entities (such as prop_static and env_cubemap) like normal entities, or perhaps because it generates a lot of detail props.
 

Seba

DR. BIG FUCKER, PHD
aa
Jun 9, 2009
2,364
2,728
You could simulate the flashing with a material proxy:

Code:
Proxies
	{
		GaussianNoise
		{
			mean 0.85
			halfWidth 0.175
			minVal 0.6
			maxVal 1
			resultVar $alpha
		}

But you'd need a fire texture. I tried messing around with the fire particle texture, but it looks kinda eh. Asylum might help with animated textures, because I know little to nothing about that.
 

TheONE

L1: Registered
Jan 12, 2013
26
1
Thanks Seba I appreciate that!

Guys I don't have experience in editing textures/materials if someone can continue on Seba work to make a VMT and VTF that I can use. I would really appreciate it
 
T

The Asylum

so, "fire lights," i assume you mean something on the same size and scale like the torches in DeGroot Keep

I could throw something together that kinda' sorta' looks like a flame without it looking too bad- making a fire look like a real fire when it's up close and the focus of the scene requires a renderer far better than I.
 

TheONE

L1: Registered
Jan 12, 2013
26
1
so, "fire lights," i assume you mean something on the same size and scale like the torches in DeGroot Keep

I could throw something together that kinda' sorta' looks like a flame without it looking too bad- making a fire look like a real fire when it's up close and the focus of the scene requires a renderer far better than I.

I need something with the scale and size of "m_brazier_flame" fire particle system.

Thanks for helping on this, I really appreciate that :)
 

TheONE

L1: Registered
Jan 12, 2013
26
1
Why not just simplify your map? If you're hitting the entity limits you'll probably see other problems.

well it is not a regular map ... it is a game mod map ... similar to jailbreak so i need lots of ents.


i am now at 1400 ents ... the max limit is 1600, but i want to keep my ent count below 1400 ents

and once i get that texture/material it will be useful in any future map.