I have been searching diligently for a good resource for a lighting tutorial for advanced lighting, and have found some great information, but I can't find exactly what I'm looking for.

Basically I am having a hard time getting certain lighting effects to behave the way I would like them to. In my map I'm trying to get lighting to pour in from a shaft, with a grate attached at the end, so the lighting comes down criss-crossed in beams.

The issue I'm having is that I can't get the brushes I made for the grate to cast the shadows on the wall from the light source, and I was also trying to get the beams more "visible" with particle effects in the beams? (i.e. dust particles)

Thanks for the help! I apologize if this was covered somewhere that I'm not finding.

Make sure you set the lightmap scale of the surface that is going to be hit with lighting to a lower value. Lower lightmaps = more defined shadowing. Just be sure you don't do this for too many areas, as it also significantly increases the physical size of the compiled BSP.

I think I read something about dustmotes being broken or missing a material. If so then I'm not sure of the proper way of achieving the effect in Portal 2.

I think he's talking about seeing beams of light in the air, msleeper; if that's the case, the effect you're talking about is called volumetric lighting. As far as I am aware, Source doesn't really natively support it as a post-processing shader the way other engines like Unreal Engine and CryEngine do. Typically the level designer with put in a bunch of sprites or a brush with a translucent texture on it. Somebody else might know of a better method.

I am trying to get an actual "beam" of light, but if it isn't natively supported I can live without it.

I'll try lowering the lightmap scale to see if that helps with the shadows.

Thanks for the replies!

There is an instance for such a light beam, i will look up the name...

Edit: No sorry it was something else i was remembering.