Fixing Some Visual Glitches

[EvilIguana966]

I'm nearing the stage where I have a product to show people but I have a few niggling visual glitches in my compiled map that I'd like to know how to fix before I go any farther.

Glitch 1:

This door has a closed areaportal that opens when the door does. Here it is in the open state:

Looks just fine. But take a look in the closed state:

You can see into the void at the bottom. I've tried a number of different things to fix this such as varying the depth of the areaportal brush and the floor brush and splitting the floor brush into two pieces all to no avail. I'm clearly misunderstanding something about how areaportals function. Any advice?

Glitch 2:

This arched hallway has lighting issues. Take a gander:

The brush faces are all part of the same smoothing group and it still causes ugly shadows all over the place. I’ve gone through a number of different configurations for this hallway and can’t seem to fix this. Currently the hallway is made of world brushes with func_details in the top corners to give it the arch effect. Previous incarnations had the entirety of the geometry visible from within the hallway as func_detail and I got the same effect. I’ve also made the props shadowless but this has no effect as expected because the light is not directly shining on them. I’m guessing I’m somehow failing to grasp the intricacies of using smoothing groups so a bit of instruction in that area would help.

Glitch 3:

Rather than breaking up brushes and adding complexity to the geometry, I’ve found I can pretty simply add a nice looking locked door with a doorway prop partially sunk into a brush and a thin brush textured with a door on the visible face. The problem is that the doorway prop in this circumstance appears extremely dark:

Apparently being sunk partway into a world brush is keeping it from being lit up. Is there any simple way to solve this or must I go break up the brushes and create a physical recess so the prop is fully within the world?


Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.

 

[StickZer0]

1) All you can do is make the areaportal thin enough to fit inside the brush/prop or make a func_detail trim at the bottom of the door to cover up the void.

2) Make sure that any non-visible faces are nodraw on the func_details, that should help stop weird light spilling through clipped parts

3) Just cut into the wall, it will look much better and if done correctly and cleanly, won't affect VVIS or your map's optimisation at all.

 

[Boylee]

1) See above.

2) What Stick said is good. Just to give you another option, you could try making that out of displacements. Give twister a go, it's great for precise mathematically generated displacements.

3) The reason you're getting lighting errors on the prop is because you've buried the prop's origin inside a brush. During compile props are lit according to where their origin is, so if it's inside a brush no light is cast on it. By manually positioning an info_lighting entity and associating the prop with it you can tell the engine where it should generate the lighting from.