Ugly shadows with lower lightmap scales?

The Siphon

L6: Sharp Member
Mar 2, 2015
278
190
I tried lowering lightmap scale, no difference at all. Also I tried that lighting guide and did a compile with those commands but again no visible fix.

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Tumby

aa
May 12, 2013
1,084
1,192
These 2 are caused by the fact that the amount of rays is limited. Make the doorway bigger and it's gonna be less notice. The truly best option you have is to compile vrad with -final.

The prop does not have a collision model, therefore a shrinkwrap of the entire model is used for lighting calculation. The fix here is to use -staticproppolys in vrad. See this for more information: http://www.nodraw.net/2010/12/lighting-compile-options/
Make sure the props properties allow these to take effect!

Sharp shadows will always look blocky. If you don't like that, try using a BIGGER lightmap size or increase the sun spread angle.

The following guide should also help you a little: https://tf2maps.net/threads/guide-lets-talk-about-lighting.19133/

EDIT: Fixed mistake where i wrote -full instead of -final. What was I thinking?
 
Last edited:

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,694
2,579
Running VRAD multiple times just overwrites the previous results; it's not like you can try it three different ways and then cycle between the results when you load up the game.
 

Blade x64

Logical insanity
aa
Sep 3, 2009
239
633

These settings amuse me.

So it starts out normally: (1)builds the bsp, (2)calculates visibility, (3)generates final lighting for ldr, then hdr, (4)copies the bsp into your game directory, and (5) launches the game.

But then it keeps going. (6) It redoes the ldr lighting with proper prop lighting. (7) It throws the ldr data out again, generating it with a custom lights file. This bsp doesn't even get copied into the game directory, and will get overwritten next time you compile.

Just put all the vrad arguments in the same one and only run that one. Also be sure it copies after the compile.