For those of you new to hammer, or unfamiliar with the details of lighting you might not know what this picture is of. Well there are several 3D view modes in hammer, one of which has been broken since the orange box release.
The lightmap grid preview mode was a handy feature in hammer that allowed you to actually see the size of the lightmap grid on a face by face basis, making it hugely easier to see what faces had a lightmap of what size - great for optimisation. But for TF2, Portal and Episode 2 the lightmap grid preview only showed the basic colour, yellow for smaller than default, blue for larger than default and white for default. this is no where near as helpful as seeing the nice blue lines on top. I don't know when they updated it, but they're back :thumbup: :thumbup:
Another feature that was added to hammer shortly after the OB release was the lighting preview and raytraced lighting preview modes, these for most people are too resource intensive to use but now with my new pc I am able to actually use them, I find the lighting preview itself too dark but I like the raytraced mode for deciding on the right environmental light direction. Its nice but it isn't actually all that practical since it just generates a single image rather than a live camera.
(NB: the ray traced lighting preview may lock up your computer if you're on an older machine, and even if you aren't it still takes 20 seconds plus to generate the view - use with caution)
