Question about lighting / $selfillum etc

DrLambda

L69: Teeheehee, Member
aa
Feb 18, 2015
458
475
Hello everyone,

for my supersecret April Fool's project i need, if possible, an area where everything has pretty much the same brightness level (not fullbright, but lighted.)

Now, i tried various options and somehow none of them seem to work.

1. Adding the textures (there are only a few ones used, and they are only used in that part of the map) to the lights.rad - Gives me compile errors because of too many lights.
2. Adding $selfillum to the vtf - I don't seem to understand what it does. My texture has an all-white alpha mask, so it should give out light if i set it up like this:

"LightmappedGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "xyz/supersecret"
"%keywords" "tf"
"$selfillum" 1
}

But nothing happens, everything stays black. I tried various other things, from adding a $selfillumtint or an $selfillummask with a white texture, but still, everything is dark.

So my question is: What would be the most reasonable approach to this problem (unrealistic as it might be) and what would you suggest? Also, how do i get the selfillum to work? Thanks!
 

Freyja

aa
Jul 31, 2009
2,994
5,813
Self illum also doesn't give off light, it is a way to make certain areas unaffected by shadows /exterior lighting as if it did, which is why it is basically always used with a mask.

Wgar youre looking for might be the unlit generic shader, as opposed to light mapped generic, but this makes your textures spear fulbright. Other than that, perhaps a very low light map scale with regular lights evenly spaced in the room?