Shadows

[twin talon]

Props come up shadowy

[thin hatch]

wym?

[earnest grove]

I don't see anything wrong with this image lol

[thin hatch]

If you're using the Flashlight then you gonna get those kind of shadows

[twin talon]

I have to use flashlight to light it up, if you look further down the hallway its pitch black like nothing is there

[thin hatch]

then

idk

[twin talon]

Well this is a name/fix for this.. hopefully someone knows.

[thin hatch]

oh

you mean that it become pitch black

you could increase -bounce

[twin talon]

On the light entity?

[thin hatch]

nah

in the compile settigns

pretty sure the models use different lighting properties so i wouldn't how to fix that

[earnest grove]

Alright I see what you mean now

[thin hatch]

@earnest grove Would this work situation? Enable Local Light Shadows

[earnest grove]

so in this case you have two options, the easier but not necessarily better of the two is to calculate lighting on your static props using the -staticproplighting flag in vrad, which calculates the lighting per-vertex received by your static props

By default, the lighting is calculated as it is received on the prop's origin, so in your case here the origin of your prop is in the dark and therefore lights the whole prop like it's in the dark.

[thin hatch]

oh you mean... that thing where they don't smooth each poligon, but gives lighting info

[twin talon]

Like that?

[earnest grove]

the other option is to assign an info_lighting to your static prop, and then move it somewhere better lit in the corridor, or even to an entirely separate space with more controlled lighting (called light-boxing). The problem with that is it will still affect the lighting across the whole prop, so you may get the inverse problem where parts in the dark adopt light from the lit areas.

[thin hatch]

yea

[earnest grove]

it's been a while since I've used anything but vbct or compile pal so I'm actually going to have to go validate myself

[twin talon]

Does it work automatically?

[thin hatch]

wym?

[twin talon]

I put it in and ran it and the props are still black

[thin hatch]

what

lemme see

[twin talon]

Thanks for the detailed responses too, appreciate your time.

[twin talon]

Thanks too for helping

[earnest grove]

it should work with the default prop static settings in the Gmod fgd unless you deliberately change the key value that allows vertex lighting to not allow it

[thin hatch]

But @earnest grove wouldnt this setting help?

In Shadow_Control
Enable Local Light Shadows

[earnest grove]

What Enable Local Light Shadows does is make it so that the angle of the render to texture shadows isn't globally defined, but rather takes an angle relative to the nearest light source

It's not related to the baked lighting

[twin talon]

Still coming out like this after putting that command into light exe

[thin hatch]

But we are worried about the lighting on the model tho

[twin talon]

Let's have a look at this tomorrow. It's late and I got school in the morning. Goodnight.

[earnest grove]

It's a static prop so it uses the baked lighting system to sample lighting and cast shadows

[thin hatch]

Night

[thin hatch]

So? could you increase -bounce

to somehow to make help a little

[earnest grove]

honestly?

maybe

I don't know, I've usually been more heavy handed with lighting

so in this case I would tend to go to manually correcting it with the info_lighting

[thin hatch]

Im saying -bounce could help a little

Yea i get it

[earnest grove]

and I'm not disagreeing

worth a try

[thin hatch]

true

[earnest grove]

I've genuinely never used the bounce flag

[mossy widget]

The room is also just genuinely dark, increasing the brightness of your light sources might also help.

[earnest grove]

Also true but I figured we'd try some technical tinkering before challenging his desired composition

[twin talon]

I've assigned each static prop a info lighting

Same results

[earnest grove]

move the info lighting then
also if you are still compiling with the flag I mentioned above, it may override the desired behavior

[twin talon]

Oh right let me disable it, and I moved the lighting to be more centre

[earnest grove]

You can remove the flag or turn off "allow vertex lighting" on those props

[twin talon]

I turned off vertex lighting and remove that flag

and all static props are assigned

[earnest grove]

alright, well; assuming everything is working as expected I suppose you're left with the sole option of lowering the contrast of your lighting conditions by either making everything darker or lighter

Alternatively, you could try lightboxing them

[earnest grove]

Basically, move your info_lighting to an isolated box and light the inside of the box under controlled conditions.

to emulate your desired received ambient light

[twin talon]

Increased and decreased brightness. no result

[earnest grove]

Then I suppose things are not working as expected.

[twin talon]

Let me try move the light back out to the centre while its bright

[earnest grove]

Alright

[twin talon]

Let me try move the prop around

[earnest grove]

at this point I'd have just gone "well, fuck it" and lightboxxed the whole corridor's props then moved on

[twin talon]

Wait did you mean assign info light top the pipes prop or light prop? I did the light prop

[earnest grove]

the props that aren't lighting properly

[twin talon]

ye hmm

[earnest grove]

hmm indeed

[twin talon]

I'm going to take a break, and on my break I am going to remember why I stopped using a shitty outdated level design tool.

[earnest grove]

乁⁠|⁠ ⁠･⁠ ⁠〰⁠ ⁠･⁠ ⁠|⁠ㄏ

it's not a difficult problem to solve, try lightboxing your info_lighting, that is about the most brute force approach you can take. If that doesn't work, you can be certain it's because something isn't set up right between your static props and their respective info_lighting

[thin hatch]

why not just change the focus setting in the light properties

or the 50 percent falloff distance

[twin talon]

Every time I go to edit this doors properties it makes me reset it so I have to re do it

I'm clicking alt e on it

[earnest grove]

It's because you're in solids mode

switch to groups

[thin hatch]

Yea

[twin talon]

thx

[twin talon]

what setting to make it not so bloomy? i've turned down brightness

[thin hatch]

50 percent fall off distance can help, but it will create light bleed issues

[twin talon]

This glass pyramid for the ceiling comes out weird ingame, how can i fix that?

Ah it seems the pyramid wouldn't load after I restarted hammer so it got removed

[earnest grove]

You're on gmod, and for some reason they thought it was a great idea to do this weird bloom boost post process on everything

so the best you can do for this is turn down the tone maps using an env_tonemap_controller

[twin talon]

Ah yeah thanks

[earnest grove]

use a logic auto to send it an onmapspawn -> setbloomscale -> (decimal variable)

[twin talon]

Cheers

And the pyramid. do you know how to make it so i can have a realistic one/ a fix ?

[earnest grove]

I haven't read that far, one sec

[earnest grove]

If it wouldn't load it was probably an invalid brush. Try to make sure your brushes are fully convex and all of the faces are coplanar.

[twin talon]

I don't know what you mean. but when I made it I made a solid pyramid then use hollow tool

how else would i make a pyramid hollow unless using clipping tool loads which would be aids

[earnest grove]

The clipping tool isn't so bad. In this case you could accomplish what you want with three planar cuts then just duplicate and rotate the brush

That is, assuming it can only be seen from the inside

[twin talon]

ye

[earnest grove]

four cuts otherwise

[twin talon]

yeah i guess cool yeah thanks

[earnest grove]

but the clipping tool is your friend

[twin talon]

woo hoo! i love the clipping tool!!

[earnest grove]

It's good at making clean bisections, it's pretty useful

[twin talon]

ah well i can't make it my brain can't seem to process how to do it

lol

[earnest grove]

Just make a brush the size of the pyramid you want, then

1. clip it two times from the top view, right in the middle, corner to corner so you have a 45 degree X crossing your brush

2. delete all but one of the resulting brushes so from the top view you have what looks like an isosceles triangle

3. From the side, clip from the corner touching the edge of your window up to the corner where the peak of your inverted pyramid should be

4. duplicate the brush and rotate it 180 degrees, place it so the peaks of the pyramid meet

5. Duplicate both and rotate them 90 degrees together, center them at the peaks as well

it would be easier to show you but I'm not somewhere I can do that right now

[twin talon]

Like that for part 3? or wym

Don't bully me lmao

Anyways my eyes are falling out of my skull, i'm going to call it a day. tysm for all the help

[earnest grove]

Not totally sure how you got that result but it's not exactly what I was going for

If I am reading the viewports right, no not like that

[thin hatch]

wait

[twin talon]

[thin hatch]

what are you trying to make?

exactly?

[twin talon]

This

[earnest grove]

just an inverted pyramid but I'm trying to teach him how to use clip to do it

[thin hatch]

A glass pryamid?

Thats all?

[earnest grove]

why not

yes

[twin talon]

Is it that i don't know how to use clip tool or that it's more of a common sense thing that i can't seem to process

[earnest grove]

Okay something

That the clip tool doesn't make obvious if you don't already know

[thin hatch]

How big is the area you're trying to cover?

[earnest grove]

If you click the clip tool icon multiple times

[twin talon]

yes I know that different ways of clipping

or just splitting a brush up

[earnest grove]

Alright just making sure because I can see how clip would be annoying if you're always trying to guess which side would be cut off

I usually just use the bisect mode that keeps both sides and delete manually what I don't want to include

[twin talon]

Ah i see

yeah good way of using it, wont make mistakes as easy i guess?

or more flexible

having multiple brushes to try out new designs

[earnest grove]

I don't know I just find fucking around with whichever side is excluded annoying so I just use it as an all-inclusive method

[twin talon]

which is irrelevant if you know what your doing

ah i see

[thin hatch]

are you trying to do this?

[earnest grove]

Yes he is

[twin talon]

yes

[thin hatch]

Do this first

[earnest grove]

Step 1

[twin talon]

my brain is fried, i'm after an irish and english 2 hour long mock paper today

[thin hatch]

Then select this

[earnest grove]

isn't Irish just English when whiskey?

[twin talon]

I don't speak fluent french

[twin talon]

🙉🙈🙊

[thin hatch]

and raise it

[twin talon]

I can't say I know how to use vertex tool

[thin hatch]

First Cut

[earnest grove]

now how am I supposed to teach him to use clip if he's just got to vertex manipulate it

[twin talon]

but yeah that seems easy enough

o giess

waot

[earnest grove]

you fiend

[twin talon]

hmmm maybe

[thin hatch]

Second Cut

[twin talon]

this is frying my brain more than technical graphics in school

[thin hatch]

Shift+V and Selet the middle square

[earnest grove]

It would take like 5 seconds to show you in a video

[twin talon]

yes i bet xd

[earnest grove]

And if by the time I get out of transit it still hasn't clicked, I'll do that

[twin talon]

right lol

[earnest grove]

but both of these methods will be nothing to you once you get used to the tools

[thin hatch]

using the front or side layout
use the up arrow, to move it up

[earnest grove]

it's definitely not rocket surgery

[thin hatch]

Bam

[twin talon]

it FEELS like the whole hammer editor is rocket science

[thin hatch]

Nah

[earnest grove]

It's just not like

[thin hatch]

it just complex trying to use it in a modern sense

[twin talon]

thanks! i can't even use clipping tool properly XD

[earnest grove]

outgoingly user friendly?

But it's pretty simple overall

[twin talon]

Yeah it definitely gets easier the more you learn, I've noticed that

[thin hatch]

Did it work?

[twin talon]

what??

[thin hatch]

The step by step

[twin talon]

oh the vertex tool thing?

but i'm tired

but i want to learn

[thin hatch]

just take like 5 seconds

[twin talon]

but i'm tired

[earnest grove]

did you ever uh

figure out the shadows?

[thin hatch]

True

[twin talon]

no XD

[earnest grove]

h

[thin hatch]

lol

[twin talon]

lmao

[thin hatch]

Gmod do be not userfriendly

[twin talon]

no it is, just not me friendly cause im dumb lol

[earnest grove]

not at all what u mean

[thin hatch]

It was designed for the community not designed for user friendliness

[earnest grove]

I think it's generous to refer to gmod's content workflow as "designed"

[thin hatch]

true I did take it in a wrong context

[earnest grove]

it's just a Hodge Podge of shit superglued together

[twin talon]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2925
Someday, I'll be like him 🤓

[thin hatch]

But GMOD just be for be commnunity to make mods for

[twin talon]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2925

OMG why won

[thin hatch]

?

[twin talon]

the link work*

[thin hatch]

The link don't work

[earnest grove]

I think you're not including the full workshop id

4 numbers seems awfully short

[twin talon]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2925489145
Someday, I'll be like him 🤓

[snow geyser]

RP_NYCity

Creator: Fishke

Game

Garry's Mod

Tags

Addon, map, Roleplay, Realism

Description

NYCity is an ambitious roleplay map set in a gritty Y2K-era New York City. The map features 2 cities: a miniature version of Manhattan, and Union City, which are connected by a bridge and a subway system. [img]https://i.imgur.com/jPDV1Iw.png[/img] [url=https://i.imgur.com/CnF5GK8.jpg] Map of NYCity [/url] [url=https://drive.google.com/file/d/14IZzfZg4HMCx9wtFGzo12Psk64mySqFF/view] Basic Navmesh for Nextbots [/url] (Put this in your garrysmod/maps folder) [url=https://steamcommu...

RP_NYCity

Creator: Fishke

Game

Garry's Mod

Tags

Addon, map, Roleplay, Realism

Description

NYCity is an ambitious roleplay map set in a gritty Y2K-era New York City. The map features 2 cities: a miniature version of Manhattan, and Union City, which are connected by a bridge and a subway system. [img]https://i.imgur.com/jPDV1Iw.png[/img] [url=https://i.imgur.com/CnF5GK8.jpg] Map of NYCity [/url] [url=https://drive.google.com/file/d/14IZzfZg4HMCx9wtFGzo12Psk64mySqFF/view] Basic Navmesh for Nextbots [/url] (Put this in your garrysmod/maps folder) [url=https://steamcommu...

[twin talon]

Oh the server has a stupid bot, it was breaking it

[thin hatch]

Looks pretty easy to do, just require massive of free time to do the layout and detailing

But one thing is pretty hard to do, is making each city building a model.. a full fledge model

[twin talon]

Is it not just squares scaled up?

[earnest grove]

Oh yeah this guy posts on another forum I frequent

Took him 2 years

[twin talon]

Like for the skybox?

[earnest grove]

Very nicely made map

[thin hatch]

Na

Like fully fledge

all of the buildings

[twin talon]

Never played on a map so well optimised, was getting 100 fps

[thin hatch]

@earnest grove Do you have it?

I want to see it

[twin talon]

But they're not models they're geometry?

like brushes

hammer

[thin hatch]

Ik

But making models for city buildings

is harder to do

[twin talon]

But why do you need models

[thin hatch]

Accuracy

and better flexibility

[twin talon]

How I see it: Go straight in and erect a bunch of squares and rectangles till you have an empire

oh and don't forget to apply a city building texture!

anyways goodnight

[thin hatch]

Night

[earnest grove]

huh? it's just a gmod addon, you can play it

[earnest grove]

depends on your point of view. models in source don't have lightmaps

[thin hatch]

no this

[thin hatch]

ye

[earnest grove]

just scroll through his post history and you can see a progression of it all going backward in time

https://knockout.chat/user/1084/posts

Oh. I guess it was longer than 2 years.

I will never have that kind of commitment to a project, that's incredible.

[twin talon]

it won't work lol

[twin talon]

Acc forget it got a simpler design

[earnest grove]

hell naw no way

@twin talon this shows both methods described here in under a minute, it's very simple

[twin talon]

tysm

[earnest grove]

!

however

I see a problem with this

your pyramid brushes are not fully enclosed

and transparent textures don't seal against leaks

[twin talon]

I have a skybox around it so you can see the sky

and it covers for leaks

also btw how to fix this silly dark spot under desk

lol

[earnest grove]

are there any brushes hidden here?

[twin talon]

I don't think so no

[earnest grove]

you need it to be fully enclosed

also, has this area been connected to your corridor with the red lights the whole time?

because if there are leaks, your lighting isn't going to compile properly either

[twin talon]

Explains my lighting issues. Should I drag a whole box around the map and see if my list of issues im about to post is fixed?

[earnest grove]

first just try sealing the top of the pyramid with another skybox brush

[twin talon]

yeah

That is how it is now

[earnest grove]

should work

transparent textures, like glass, don't seal; so the pyramid brushes themselves wouldn't seal in that setup

[twin talon]

Okay lets test it

Well its sealed

still the same

Or is it suppose to look like that

I put a skybox around the whole map and i fixed some lighting issues, I assume the pyramid is gonna look like this? How can I add a frame?

[twin talon]

I'm after clicking a button and can't revert, how to get rid of red lines?

[earnest grove]

that's bounding boxes I think

I don't remember, I thought it was I or O or P but it doesn't seem to make a difference on my end

hotkey reference says it's the i key

🤷‍♂️

[twin talon]

Ah yeah I see thanks, and I've dropped the pyramid idea. But thanks for showing me how to use clipping tool better.

[earnest grove]

what texture were you using?

glasswindowbreak070a?

[twin talon]

ye but all textures are giving off the same

all glass textures *

[earnest grove]

may I take a look directly at the vmf

[twin talon]

@earnest grove

[earnest grove]

css content?

[twin talon]

yeah

and some customer tophatwaffle textures

[earnest grove]

alright, excuse me a moment; for some reason css content isn't mounting so I'm going to go dick around with hammer for a bit

[twin talon]

ah right do i need to leave the map alone cause ur making updates so anything i do wont save

[twin talon]

There's CSS and TopHatWaffle RealWorld textures in there too

[earnest grove]

you can do whatever you like to the map, I'm just going to see if I can figure out whatever else is going on with the version you've sent me

[earnest grove]

but even the obvious css ones aren't working, when they should be since I have it installed and mounted, so I'm going to look into this first

[twin talon]

Ah okay

[earnest grove]

alright whatever, I'll just use the gmod hammer for now, same difference

I can see why things might be getting a little mixed up here but so far, other than this open hole at the end of one of the hallways, I don't see anything the compiler shouldn't technically be able to deal with.

I'm going to try compiling it and see what the compiler spits out.

[twin talon]

Okay

[earnest grove]

I have a question here

you have a lot of lights with names on them

such as the red lights in the corridor

do you intend for these lights to toggle on/off at any point, or is it just habitual that you've given them names?

I can see that you have the ones in the little meeting room bound to a switch, so that makes sense on its own

@twin talon

alright well, whatever your intentions are, I do need to explain a fundamental limitation and behavior of source's lighting

whenever you give a light entity a name, the lighting compiler sees that and anticipates that you want to be able to switch the light on or off

this causes two things to happen

1. it reduces the amount of bounces made for that light entity, which reduces the overall apparent brightness and quality of the light produced by the entity
2. it compiles the lighting, and lighting that it interacts with, in both possible states for the light; on or off.

it considers one name to be one group of states, so if you have 50 lights all with the same name, it will consider them all to be turned on or off at the same time, which is fine

but if you have them named lights 1 through 50, each light is considered to be an independent state

and source's baked lighting has a relatively low ceiling of light states that can be stored per face, it's like 4 or 6 or something

so if you have two lights in the same room interacting with one another, named light 1 and 2, the compiler now produces these states (0 = off, 1 = on)

00
11
10
01

so you've now created four light states with just two uniquely named lights

so if you intend to switch groups of lights on or off together, give them all the same name

[twin talon]

Ah the lights in that corridor named red lights aren't supposed to be named

Just the meeting room ones

[earnest grove]

that simplifies life

alright so I'm not going to go over every little thing I did, but I'll tell you which made big differences and what mistakes you had that were preventing things from working

1. First and foremost, leaks. When you compile a map, it must be sealed. The compilers simply cannot do their job properly without a contained volume to work inside of.

2. It is important to know that brushes whose faces have a transparent texture on one side will not seal the map, and they will permit leaks.

3. Keep an eye on your light states. Group light states by common names and understand that lights with multiple states will produce truncated, lower quality lighting that might not light how you expect them to.

4. In the worst case scenario, lightboxing is your friend. You'll see in the vmf I send back that I've lightboxxed your pipes to create a controlled setting for lighting the prop's info_lighting, and that has helped the prop's lighting.

5. Your "missing window" was just a very translucent texture without good lighting on it. In the vmf you'll see I've added a supplementary light to help illuminate the window surfaces.

6. Your corridor was darkly lit, so I turned the lighting into two parts: The first part is having small, bright, low radius lights right near your light source. This has just become an accent effect that shows off that your lights are, well emitting light. The second part was duplicating your lights and moving them out a bit, giving the resulting copies a larger radius, and dimming them a lot. This gives a lower, more pervasive "ambient" light that helps give the negative space some values to work with beyond absolute darkness.

You're also going to want to work on reducing the amount of overlapping brushes you have. For example; here you can see weird lighting. This is because of strange cuts being made on your faces by intersecting brushes. The compiler does the best it can to cull and cut things that intersect and overlap, but when you can, try to help lighten the compiler's job a bit.

[twin talon]

I just added a whole new part to the map -

[earnest grove]

That's fine. Just look at the one I sent you, I only did it for illustrative purposes for you to learn from

not to do your job for you

[twin talon]

Oh cool, thanks // I will take a look

[earnest grove]

here's your pipes now, with the lightboxing and proper light bouncing in the hallway from removing the light names. You might want to change the settings from how I've got them, I just did it quickly to show the difference in approach.

I don't know how that picture is so goddamn compressed, jesus christ

[twin talon]

Cool thanks so much for all this

[earnest grove]

last thing, worth knowing

I compiled the corridor in the screenshot above with -staticproppolys, I recommend generally always using this flag when you're working on your lighting.

especially for these pipe props, where their collision mesh is just two or three big boxes around the pipes

[twin talon]

Ah okay good to know

[twin talon]

I'll work on some fixes then. and I was having an issue with props not loading in, theyre prop statics and they can be prop statics, but wont load it

[earnest grove]

https://tenor.com/view/the-simpsons-homer-simpson-bush-hide-im-out-gif-17449504

[twin talon]

Its not leaks lol

I sealed the map i believe

[earnest grove]

always validate in your compiler

and if you are having trouble finding them, load your pointfile

[twin talon]

Done and done, fixed the leaks and these props still wont load in

[earnest grove]

those are physics props

I don't think they support static

if you really want them to act static, disable their motion or set them to prop_dynamic_override, but if it's static lighting you're after I think you're SoL

[twin talon]

ty

[twin talon]

Loving how this room is coming out

Still need to fix the bloom on the lighting

[earnest grove]

just toss in a logic_auto and an env_tonemap_controller, send "onmapspawn -> your tonemap controller -> setbloomscale 0.15"

[thin hatch]

What did I wake up too

[twin talon]

The nodes down here won't load, I've checked for leaks, and the compile log is fine.

[earnest grove]

what do you mean they won't load?

they aren't connecting?

[twin talon]

They're just not loading ingame

[earnest grove]

I can't tell anything from that screenshot

could you turn on mat_fullbright

[thin hatch]

What are the nodes for?

[twin talon]

NPCs

[thin hatch]

They don't use nav meshes?

[twin talon]

SNPCs and NPCs use ground nodes, NextBots and other bases like DrgBase or CPTBase use navmeshes

[thin hatch]

Does the nodes have rules that you have to follow to make it work?

[earnest grove]

try placing them above the ground a little, put a couple intermediary nodes between them, and be more generous on the stairs

[twin talon]

Just put em near eachother