In Portal 2, some of the tile textures use a pre-built envmap texture with soft transitions between generic colors. This, combined with various tint and saturation settings in the material files, allows surfaces to look glossy without actually being reflective. I actually mistook it for phong shading at first.
Which, now that I've decided to resume work on my Fort Frolic map, is the look I am aiming to recreate for my tiled floor. As I understood it, the only reason I can't just straight-up swipe the file is that Portal 2 uses VTF 7.5 and the Orange Box engine can only recognize up to 7.4, so I need to convert it. So I exported all the faces from VTFEdit and re-imported them into a new 7.4 texture set to "Environment Map", with all of the same specs and checkboxes set as far as I could tell. Then I copypasted every line from the original material file that applied to environment maps, figuring I might as well start with a perfect duplicate and tweak variables from there if necessary.
But neither Hammer nor the game is able to load the envmap texture I created. The game specifically told me so in the console. Instead, I just get the standard fuchsia-and-black checkerboard. Furthermore, it's not applying the tint and saturation settings I copied into the material file to said checkerboard. I'm not sure if that's related or not. It was able to find the envmap mask and apply it correctly, which frankly just raises further questions.
And I know it's not a format issue, because when I tried just dumping the original file into my folder and reloading materials, it gave me additional errors about invalid version numbers.
Which, now that I've decided to resume work on my Fort Frolic map, is the look I am aiming to recreate for my tiled floor. As I understood it, the only reason I can't just straight-up swipe the file is that Portal 2 uses VTF 7.5 and the Orange Box engine can only recognize up to 7.4, so I need to convert it. So I exported all the faces from VTFEdit and re-imported them into a new 7.4 texture set to "Environment Map", with all of the same specs and checkboxes set as far as I could tell. Then I copypasted every line from the original material file that applied to environment maps, figuring I might as well start with a perfect duplicate and tweak variables from there if necessary.
But neither Hammer nor the game is able to load the envmap texture I created. The game specifically told me so in the console. Instead, I just get the standard fuchsia-and-black checkerboard. Furthermore, it's not applying the tint and saturation settings I copied into the material file to said checkerboard. I'm not sure if that's related or not. It was able to find the envmap mask and apply it correctly, which frankly just raises further questions.
And I know it's not a format issue, because when I tried just dumping the original file into my folder and reloading materials, it gave me additional errors about invalid version numbers.