How to see Models inside the bounding boxes?

Oct 6, 2008
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445
Hi,

I'm working on a major upgrade of my map for the B2 version - based on your feedback :thumbup1:.

I'm currently in the process of replacing all those HL2 rocks with TF2 models but am finding this really annoying - is there anyway you can view your models in th camera view instead of the solid colours? I mean, I can see all the mesh etc, in top/side/front and in close when I zoom in - but when I zoom out I get a solid colour and can no longer see the model. I'm finding that it's hard to line up things to make them look good.

Also I've noticed a couple of wierd lighting things going on - e.g. a couple of the rocks (mining/rock) have a yellow orange glow to them in brilliant day light and under one of them in the shadows - the shadow area has a purple tint to it - stays purple after I build cubemaps too.

Any Ideas? I search 4 different ways here already looking for some clues re the models.
 

grazr

Old Man Mutant Ninja Turtle
aa
Mar 4, 2008
5,441
3,814
You need to go to your options panel and under the "3d views" tab, change the render distance for models to something higher. By default it's relatively low.

As for your other issues it sounds like a HDR problem. You should limit the HDR values to something more reasonable to avoid bright blurs. Do this with a en env_tonemap_controller and look at the SDK .vmf examples for demonstrations of acceptable values to put in its I/O settings that control said bloom effects. As for the shadows, it depends on their intensity, very low level light volumes skew RGB values and cause purple-brown blotches on geometry (though i've never personally seen it on models, it always seemed to be a lightmap related issue).

EDIT: of course some of this might be redundant, i saw similar issues caused by vrad when the SDK broke, affecting models, displacements and alpha textures alike. As a last resort try varifying your game data.

As a final piece of advice, the secondary light value in the environment light controls the intensity of shadows, so you can control the ambience of outdoors shadows by making them lighter/darker (at least i know you can make them lighter, i don't recall experimenting with making them darker but presumably it can work that way). Doing so may allow vrad to utilise the additional light to better calculate proper RGB values for the shadow. But this is an extreme that shouldn't really be necassery and only used as a last resort unless you have thematic-aesthetical purposes to utilise such a feature.
 
Last edited:
Oct 6, 2008
1,947
445
Thanks Grazr:thumbup1:

That model thing has really speeded things up!

Will try the lights in a bit.