A non-reflective blue pickup truck skin?

Baysin

L2: Junior Member
Feb 14, 2008
80
15
I just realized that the blue skin for the pickup truck model is entirely reflective all over, like it's made of mirrors.... wood slats, tires, and all. On the other hand, the red pickup truck is fine. I had placed the blue truck in my map and was trying to figure out what setting I had changed to make it like that, when I realized I hadn't done anything at all, that's just the way it is. I'm guessing it just needs a new skin? Is there a corrected skin out there for it? Come to think of it, is the pickup truck even an official model? I'm not sure if it's in any official maps or not, now that I'm thinking about it. I looked in a couple of custom maps that it's in, and sure enough, shiny chrome all over. Anyway, I was surprised I hadn't noticed it before now, and I was wondering if there were any solutions out there, or if I was just going to have to leave it out or use the red skin only.
 

Sgt Frag

L14: Epic Member
May 20, 2008
1,443
710
It is official and I do believe it is in official maps off to the sides.

You do have to use an entity to control where it's lightsource comes from for some reason. If you search you will find it because I had posted quite awhile back about it.
Still it seems the tires do stay shiny.
It's possible the vmf for the red and blu skin is different. Maybe the blu one needs fixed there. I haven't looked into that yet.
 

Baysin

L2: Junior Member
Feb 14, 2008
80
15
Hmmmmm.... yeah I was playing 2fort today and noticed the pickup trucks off to the sides in the blu and red courtyards. They both looked perfectly fine. I had tried using an info_lighting on it, which helped, but just made it look like dim mirrors rather than shiny mirrors. I'll have to grab a decompiled 2fort file and see if I can figure out what they did. I'd already done a search on this site for related threads and came up empty.

EDIT: I'm just getting to a point in my first map where I'm finding weird lighting issues and trying to solve them, and this is just one of several. So, I'm in a learning stage here... hopefully I'll figure it all out :)
EDIT EDIT: Okay, a little more sleuthing turned up the thread you'd mentioned, where it was suggested to try a path_track and/or an info_target rather than an info_lighting. Furthermore, examining the decompiled 2fort map showed nothing unusual at all. They had set the model to no physics (makes sense, as it's outside the play area) and put a fade distance on it. Otherwise, all default settings with no lighting source designated. So I made a little room with no lighting in it at all, pitch black inside, put a path_track and an info_target inside AND outside. I didn't think it'd make any difference, but for the sake of completeness, I made different blue pickups that had fade distances set, default physics, no physics, and using the bounding box for collision. I set each one to use one of the different entities for their lighting source. No effect at all, all models were lit the same and had the same reflective surface all over. I CAN get it to where the reflections aren't very noticeable. From some angles it'll look okay, but the reflections are still there, and if you just move a bit it'll be all shiny wood and tires again. I have no idea, at this point, how Valve got theirs to look normal. Oh, and yes I'm using cubemap entities and building the cubemaps.

So... if anyone can give me a hint, or at least confirm that I'm not stupid/crazy/completely clueless, that'd be great... otherwise, I guess I'm only using the red pickup for now. It's more of the puzzle of the thing that's got me, rather than the inconvenience of not having the colour skin I'd prefer.
 
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Baysin

L2: Junior Member
Feb 14, 2008
80
15
Hmmmm. I had actually wondered about HDR. I've not done anything with HDR at all yet. So on my little test map, I compiled it with the HDR box checked, then built cubemaps for both HDR and LDR, and.... nothing. I mean, I can tell the difference with HDR, but it's still inappropriately shiny all over. I downloaded that map, and sure enough, the trucks look fine in it. Since I don't really know anything about using HDR yet, maybe there's something I'm missing, but just the quick and dirty HDR build did nothing.

It's maddening, no other prop that I've noticed has this issue.
 

Nineaxis

Quack Doctor
aa
May 19, 2008
1,767
2,820
I have one in the detail area in Stovepipe's BLU spawn, nothing special applied, and it works fine.
 

Baysin

L2: Junior Member
Feb 14, 2008
80
15
Okay, well, since I obviously don't know what you're referring to, anyone care to enlighten me?
 

YM

LVL100 YM
aa
Dec 5, 2007
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No I highly doubt its got anything to do with the fancy compile settings since I used them on hoodoo and the cubemap on it was still messed up.

One experiment I did was to build the HDR cubemaps twice (since it wasn't a problem on LDR) The first time you set mat_specular to 0 to eliminate pink and then again with mat_specular set to 1 so that its reflecting the first cubemap pass.
So the first time you end up with a half white reflection but the second time you end up with an almost correct reflection. The more times you repeat this process the better the result (but the longer it takes).

Another way to do get it reflecting properly is to locate the .vmt file in the gcf and extract it to the same location and simply comment out (or delete) the envmap line so it has no reflections at all. then when you have compiled your map simply use pakrat to embed it in (you must remember to do it manually since pakrat wont find it on auto and it wont work if it isnt paked in)

Hope that helps
 

Baysin

L2: Junior Member
Feb 14, 2008
80
15
Well, this is strange. I used the trick at the end of that tutorial and compiled it with the -staticproplighting setting, and it worked.... but only for the models with physics turned off. The rest are still highly reflective all over. If I want to do this in a play area, I'd have to put some brushes inside the model, or something goofy like that, otherwise there's no collision. That's pretty close, and better than nothing I guess, though I'm still totally baffled as to what's going on here and why this one skin on this one prop is acting up, when nothing else is.

EDIT: Oh nards, I hadn't seen Youme's post there. I'll have to try the multiple cubemap builds trick and see if that works. If so, that'd be a better solution I think. Still leaves me wondering double-ewe-tee-eff, but if I can find a workaround, I'll be able to live with it. :)
 
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Boylee

pew pew pew
aa
Apr 29, 2008
1,068
709
Worth noting that if you do extract & edit the textures and materials from the gcf then you also need to extract the base textures and materials for the truck too, and then pakrat the lot of them. With just the blue textures I got purple checkers. Also none of the textures will be found in pakrat auto mode, so you need to add them manually.
i.e
Code:
pickup01.vmt
pickup01.vtf
pickup02.vmt
pickup02.vtf
pickup04.vmt  - blue material
pickup04.vtf  - blue material texture