Shadows on displacements and bird's eye view

[soylent robot]

First question, probably heard this a bunch of times but i cant find anything about it. Im using displacements to hide the gaps that happen when a skybox intersects with a brush, but the displacements are having odd shadow problems:

you can see how the shadows arent right on the roofs on the top, how do i sort this out so they have shadows correctly like the normal brushes?

second question, how are birds eye view pictures like this achieved?

Is there a console command that allows this kind of screenshot, or is it actually removing all the roofs and ceilings and stuff so the map looks like that?

cheers!

 

[YM]

Displacements smooth differently to regular brushes, so the lighting is smoothing around those corners as if they were nice and rounded. The solution for that particular scenario is to make the edges not meet exactly (ie: have the roof overhang slightly)

as for the overhead:

cl_leveloverview <number>

Get into position in the centre of the map, use noclip and the swim up/down keys to change the height it clips at. the number is the zoom level. It also helps if you aim level before activating it and let go of the mouse. That way you can use wasd to move around. if you're looking up or down when you do, you'll end up moving up and down as well, that's why I recommended the swim up/down keys.

 

[soylent robot]

so the solution would be to have displacements only where the skybox is, and have the other faces be other brushes?

thanks!

 

[YM]

Well that's not quite what I said. But I suppose it'll work.