Prop lighting issue / making an engraving in the wall

[gourmet_salad]

I'm trying to make some symbols engraved into walls around my jump map. The engraving uses 20ish brushes and i'll be using it about a dozen times across the map, so I thought the best way to do this is make a custom prop with the symbol engraved into a bit of wall which i'll then try to blend seamlessly into a larger wall (picture attached).

I made the prop using Hammer++'s built-in propper tool. The problem is lighting does not look right at all, and so the prop does not blend in. (the dark gray texture is the same texture as the surrounding wall, but the lighting makes it darker. The glowing pink is intended, it's an UnlitGeneric texture, but it is not part of the prop, that's just the surface behind the prop)

• I'm using custom textures for both the prop and the wall
• The prop's entire back half (facing inwards towards the wall) is nodraw, skipped by propper (i ticked skip nodraw faces), maybe that's a problem?
• I'm guessing the issue is I need to make the prop vertex lit rather than lit from a single point?
• Solutions I've tried:

- -staticproplighting in the compile options (via compilepal)
- use an info_lighting as the lighting origin
- messed with some of the prop parameters a little bit
- I read that props can not be vertex lit if they used bumpmap textures, but propper has an option to strip textures of bumpmaps and I ticked that.

Spoiler: static_prop properties for the screenshot above

Spoiler: VMT of my custom texture

LightMappedGeneric
{
$basetexture "kestrel/concrete_modular_floor001a_k"
$surfaceprop default
$bumpmap "kestrel/concrete_modular_floor001a_k_normal"
}

I also thought of just skipping the prop idea and just making all these engravings around the map out of brushes (turned func_detail ofc). All in all there are 19 of these engravings and each one is like 30 brushes, so I could just burn through ~600 brushes. I might be able to afford it with my brush count, but most likely hammer will hate it.

I don't want to use a decal, I like the depth of the symbol being engraved. Maybe a decal with a bumpmap that makes it look engraved is feasible, but I'm not sure it'll have a lot of depth.


Any help is much appreciated =)

 

[gourmet_salad]

I figured it out a couple days ago, if anyone else is stuck -- just don't do "fast lighting" in the compile options, haha. and, uh, add "-StaticPropLighting"

It actually did not completely deal with the problem as the prop is slightly darker than its surroundings (but not nearly as bad as the screenshot above), though I think I'll take that as a win, and maybe add a $color2 tint to the VMT to compensate.