Light from windows

You have an nice interior area of your map. You have a few opaque windows and you want to have them cast light into your map.



How can you achieve this? Its easy. You build a box at the angle you want the light to shine through your window and place it behind the window. It is best if you make the box the same size as the window.



Texture the whole box with nodraw, because this will never be seen by the player. You can now place a light spot in the far side of the box, or texture the back inside face with a lights/white texture.

If you were to compile the map now, you would not see the light because the "window" brush is blocking the light! To fix this you will turn the window into a func_brush and disable shadows.

Now your window will appear to cast light on the floor in the same shape of the window.

Cast more shadows

As you can see in the first picture the window frame is casting shadows. Obviously the texture isn't casting shadows. To achieve this you need to make use of the block light texture. Simply make small brushes with the block light texture on all faces and place it where you think the frame will go.



Note: you may want to turn the light grid down on the floor and walls around the window if you want hard shadows. The example picture uses 4 unit light map.