Hello everyone
I made some wall lights for my map, but they seem to be way too bright, even on black textures.
Is there any way I can tweak this?
I made the wall lights based on this tutorial http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Glass_Light_%28Portal_2%29

Press Shift+A to select Face Edit Sheet tool you used to apply light_panel_cool. then mess around with texture scale..The higher the numbers(X,Y), more bright it's going to be..

Thank you, sir! But apparently the scaling works opposite to me: The bigger the texture scale is, the dimmer the light is (I found 1.05 to be just fine).

vrad.exe places lights by surfaces with textures specified in the light files (lights.rad by default). If you scale up the texture, the lights will get further apart. Scaling too much and you will be able to see each light point. A better way is to create your own material and specify its light emission properties in a lights (.rad) file. You can add a map specific file so you won't need to edit the default file. Read more here: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki ... ghts_files. If you don't know how to make a material, there is plenty of information in the VDC wiki, but if you need more help, just ask.

Everything you said was totally new to me. I guess I need to learn to make custom textures then.

Ald?z wrote:
vrad.exe places lights by surfaces with textures specified in the light files (lights.rad by default). If you scale up the texture, the lights will get further apart. Scaling too much and you will be able to see each light point. A better way is to create your own material and specify its light emission properties in a lights (.rad) file. You can add a map specific file so you won't need to edit the default file. Read more here: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki ... ghts_files. If you don't know how to make a material, there is plenty of information in the VDC wiki, but if you need more help, just ask.

But if this was truely needed, how did VALVe make thiers?

They did use light_panel_??? textures, I have found a scale of 3-4 works out nicely, not too bright but you don't see all the individual points (unless lightmaps scale is, for whatever reason, lower than 16)

Also rememeber the light is going to be behind a glass model so if there is any deficiency the model will hide it.

Sliipperi wrote:
Everything you said was totally new to me. I guess I need to learn to make custom textures then.

Yeah, I thought so. For now this might be over your head, but it didn't hurt to mention it. Anyway, in this case with light emitting materials, you don't need to create a new texture, just a material (plain text file with .vmt extension).

Groxkiller585 wrote:
But if this was truely needed, how did VALVe make thiers?

They did use light_panel_??? textures, I have found a scale of 3-4 works out nicely, not too bright but you don't see all the individual points (unless lightmaps scale is, for whatever reason, lower than 16)

Also rememeber the light is going to be behind a glass model so if there is any deficiency the model will hide it.

When I wrote my last post, I didn't know how Valve did their light panels exactly. Now I've looked at the light panel instances, and they're actually scaling the materials to get different brightnesses. So if you're fine with how they did it, then you don't have to do anything extra. In fact, there is no point in making your own panels at all then. There might be occasions though, when scaling is not good enough and you want more control.