Can I make brushes with blocklight texture overlap each other?

[raphu604]

Hi guys, I'm making some brushes with the texture blocklight to get a great shadow effect of some truss supports on the floor in my map... Now, let's just say, it's a mess up... a BIG mess up... And I'm kind of disappointed and frustrated that Valve didn't make a better collision model for these truss supports, but I can't change that, so I just decided to do this thing with the blocklights... But I can't do it without making some light blocking brushes overlap... is this bad? Does making them func_details change something?

[Karlos_Modder]

Keep them as a world brush as vvis will ignore them anyway. And it doesnt really matter if some (of any type) brushes overlap as vbsp will chop and merge them anyway. It just means vbsp will take a bit longer.

What is the lightmap scale on the receiving brush set to?
Setting it to 4 will give a good shadow cast.

Also have you set -textureshadows -StaticPropLighting -StaticPropPolys in the vrad parameter box?
This will make vrad use the modles texture as a shadow reference and not the collision model.

[raphu604]

Originally Posted by Karlos_Modder

Keep them as a world brush as vvis will ignore them anyway. And it doesnt really matter if some (of any type) brushes overlap as vbsp will chop and merge them anyway. It just means vbsp will take a bit longer.

What is the lightmap scale on the receiving brush set to?
Setting it to 4 will give a good shadow cast.

Also have you set -textureshadows -StaticPropLighting -StaticPropPolys in the vrad parameter box?
This will make vrad use the modles texture as a shadow reference and not the collision model.

Oh my god, thank you so much for this! I didn't know these things... I wish I knew that -textureshadows thing earlier :S
By the way, what does this staticproppolys parameter do anyway? I've heard of it before, but I don't know what it is (or does).

[EDIT] PS: I have a lightmap of 2 on the receiving texture... It couldn't be better than this I guess... =)

[EDIT2] PPS: The textureshadows, staticproplighting and staticproppolys parameters don't work, the models still appear with a plain shadow generated by the collision model...

[Karlos_Modder]

staticproppolys is how the prop casts a shadow when light hits it. The old method uses the colison model and this method will use the models polygons to cast a shadow. (Self Shadowing with Vertex Lighting)
Works with -textureshadows....

However some props from HL2 (excluding EP1 and 2) wont cast propper shadows as the model textures dont have a $alpha set in the vtf.
A good example is all the exterior/Fence*.mdl.
You can however extract them from the GCF archive add the $alpha line and place the vtf in the corresponding folder in Hl2.
Just remeber if/when you distrubute your map you need to pakrat the new vtf otherwise ppl will see checkerboards on those models.

[raphu604]

Originally Posted by Karlos_Modder

staticproppolys is how the prop casts a shadow when light hits it. The old method uses the colison model and this method will use the models polygons to cast a shadow. (Self Shadowing with Vertex Lighting)
Works with -textureshadows....

However some props from HL2 (excluding EP1 and 2) wont cast propper shadows as the model textures dont have a $alpha set in the vtf.
A good example is all the exterior/Fence*.mdl.
You can however extract them from the GCF archive add the $alpha line and place the vtf in the corresponding folder in Hl2.
Just remeber if/when you distrubute your map you need to pakrat the new vtf otherwise ppl will see checkerboards on those models.

Thank you for the useful infos... I will do that stuff