Hi guys !

I'm working on my first attempt of PTI editing into hammer (I know, shame on me !). It's early (early) wip and you can find some shots here : http://imgur.com/a/1HLII/

As you can see I got this lightining problem on some brushes textured with plastic walls. They just appeared to be black, not rendering the lightining of the room. I've been looking for some topics here and on the wiki but anything i've found was able to solve it. It's not vertex textures and there is just a framework prop_static on it (could it come from here ?). I also thought it could come from the overlay that i put on it, but when removing it's still black. Thanks in advance for helping.

Set "disable shadows" to yes on the prop_statics. This problem comes from models being very close to a wall, confusing VRAD. The map itself looks pretty good for a PTI modification, are you using skyboxes? (just checking to make sure you don't box in the entire map, that's horrible for optimisation if you aren't careful.)

Thanks, it worked !

I'm actually boxing my map with skyboxes, what should I do though ? I was thinking about nodrawing every brush not meant to be seen for optimization.

Editing : I think the skybox brings me anothe rproblem : sometimes when i try to copile i got this message :

FindPortalSide: Couldn't find a good match for which brush to assign to a portal
near (6144.0 6656.0 1536.0)
Leaf 0 contents:
Leaf 1 contents: CONTENTS_SOLID
viscontents (node 0 contents ^ node 1 contents): CONTENTS_SOLID
This means that none of the brushes in leaf 0 or 1 that touches the portal has C
ONTENTS_SOLID
Check for a huge brush enclosing the coordinates above that has contents CONTENT
S_SOLID
Candidate brush IDs:

And the coordinates get me to the skybox brushes. I just apply again the texture and it works, but dunno if it's "normal" :/

That sounds like you have a realllllly big box of sky texture, which is the wrong way to do a skybox (even though it's the one that makes most sense !)

Here's a tuto on the VDC for how to do it to right, and here are pictures so it makes more sense. As is typical with VDC tutorials, they are slightly oriented towards CS:S but the concepts still apply.

Map is looking great by the way. Very healthy.

Thanks for the advices guys, you're making my day ! I've been working on the skybox structure to make it closer to the bts area. Performances have increased but i think there is still a lot of optimisation to do.

Some shots of the work in progress in the bottom and upper side of the test. Sorry for bad quality, i'll try to make some better when polishing.

Hey guys, I'm bumping this thread because I get another kind of "lightning problem" on a map i'm working on. I'd like to get a cool projected texture effect (little bit like this one but with natural light) with the walkway and a env_projected texture. I don't manage to get something satisfying : shadows are always blurry and it's juste like the projected texture isn't working, or not strong enough.

You can find more shots about my problem here. My env_projected is also linked to a logic auto : OnMapSpawn / projected_01 / TurnOn because i was thinking of switching between two. And also i'm compiling in Normal / Normal / Normal / HDR without any problem.

Thanks in advance !

Do you have the keyvalue "enable shadows" set to yes?

Try using ent_fire to make sure it's turned on. You can only have one projected texture on at once, so all others are automatically turned off when the TurnOn input is triggered. Do you happen to have other instances for things like elevators or such? Those could have a projected_texture, and have overriden yours.

Also make sure your NearZ and FarZ are correct. The projected_texture only "works" between the two distances, so make sure the NearZ is small enough so it doesn't miss the object that's casting shadows. (You should probably bump up the NearZ so the rectangle is closer to the walkway. It's also useful to stop light models from casting shadows if the projected_texutre is placed inside the model.) Make sure the FarZ is large enough that it extends through the walls and stuff you want shadows on.

Obviously larger distance is more costly for your computer to render so shrink the difference as much as possible to reduce lag. You probably want to turn in on and off via triggers so it runs only when the player can see it. The OnFullyClosed and OnOpen outputs of prop_testchamber_doors or func_doors are pretty handy for doing this.

The problem is that there can be only one projected texture active at any given time in portal 2.
The elevator has a projected texture and the pti observation room has a projected texture.

Make sure to check the logic from the trigger just behind the entrance door and turn it on there, instead of turning on the observation room projected texture.

And as CamBen said; the enable shadows is very important.

You can also look at the far-z of the projected texture, in my experience its good practice to set the far-z a bit bigger than required to have the projected texture hit the surfaces it needs to hit.
So if it would need 700 units to hit everything, it might be a good idea to set the far-z to 850 or something.

Then there's the texture name; flashlight001. Try changing the name of that to flashlight001_improved that can make it nicer.

And finally you should try and go to the export compile and select the full final both setting! It takes a bit longer to compile but it generally looks a lot nicer.

Ok, the problem came from the elevators' projected teture. Just had to trigger them off when the player leaves the room and that was good ! I've used your advices to make it look quite a satisfying way :

It's not full compile though, and still WIP.

Thanks again for your support!

That looks like its going to be a great map!