Quick Overlay Question
taleden
Join Date: 2003-04-06 Member: 15252Members, Constellation
Join Date: 2003-04-06 Member: 15252Members, Constellation
I've got some walkway lights and I'm not sure quite how to get them to look how I want. The lights are installed on the inner lip of a raised trim along a walkway, as in the picture above - the selected block has the light on it and should shine on the walkway, but the top of the block has the same texture as the trim itself and should blend in.
My first try was to use standard texture lighting. This made a nice pattern on the walkway, but the light texture looked really ugly in fullbright, and even worse if I increased the gamma above 1.0 - the texture became completely washed out very quickly, losing its detail and turning into a pure white blob.
The second try was overlay lighting. I turned the selected block into a func_wall and put a different light texture on the brush behind it, casting through the func_wall onto the walkway. The problem this time was that it meant the visible light texture was not any brighter than the rest of the trim, as if the lights were off, which made the light on the walkway look very strange.
My third try was to put a point light in front of each light texture and have the texture itself cast no light. The light entities ended up making the textures fullbright anyway, since they were so close to them, so that didn't work.
Finally I went back to texture lighting and tried setting a minimum light level on the func_wall, which made the light texture have a happy medium brightness, but it applied to the top of the brush as well, so there was this ugly bright rectangle on the otherwise continuous metal trim.
So basically, what I'm looking for is a way to set a medium brightness on an overlay - brighter than the surrounding architecture, but not fullbright. Does anyone have any ideas about how to do this?
My first try was to use standard texture lighting. This made a nice pattern on the walkway, but the light texture looked really ugly in fullbright, and even worse if I increased the gamma above 1.0 - the texture became completely washed out very quickly, losing its detail and turning into a pure white blob.
The second try was overlay lighting. I turned the selected block into a func_wall and put a different light texture on the brush behind it, casting through the func_wall onto the walkway. The problem this time was that it meant the visible light texture was not any brighter than the rest of the trim, as if the lights were off, which made the light on the walkway look very strange.
My third try was to put a point light in front of each light texture and have the texture itself cast no light. The light entities ended up making the textures fullbright anyway, since they were so close to them, so that didn't work.
Finally I went back to texture lighting and tried setting a minimum light level on the func_wall, which made the light texture have a happy medium brightness, but it applied to the top of the brush as well, so there was this ugly bright rectangle on the otherwise continuous metal trim.
So basically, what I'm looking for is a way to set a medium brightness on an overlay - brighter than the surrounding architecture, but not fullbright. Does anyone have any ideas about how to do this?
Comments
Another option is to put the light-texture inside the wall, but for a step I cant see that looking as great, it would also kick-up your rspeeds a fair bit <!--emo&:(--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif'><!--endemo-->
About the final entities count, are you sure about that : I was thinking lights (entity-point) were part of the 400 entities limit ?
flay tries to increase this.
The soo popular ~400 join-team entities do not count to this limit since 2.0 , they are now hardcoded into the mod (as "unchangeable" stuff it no longer is handled like an entity).
Static light and light_spot entities (without name, custom apperance or toggleability) do not count to ANY final ingame entity limit. They just count to the 2048 entities engine limit during the compiling process.
(normaly you have 10 times as much turrets and structures ingame (counting to the 1024 ents limits) than your map contained light entities during compile)
Overlay light must be like the jointeam-holograms, all but one face should show the NULL texture.