Making rooms look better
Ok, so you?ve made a room. It?s a nice room, it has windows, detail? You stare at it mindlessly for half an hour and still don?t manage to answer your question: ?What the hell is missing??. Well, I don?t know WHAT it?s missing, nor what you were thinking when you made it, but I could give you a hint on how to add some cool lighting to your lifeless environment, and here I?m not referring to the ?light beam through ceiling? effect seen at the beginning of Half-Life, because that would be an insult to my intelligence 
since it has been done 2,000,000 times before and most mappers are sick of it.
1. First, get a room (or make one) and make some (window) holes and add func_wall windows with their rendernt about 100 and rendermode texture.
2. Enter the texture browser, find and select the skylight texture (under ?lights?, do?h!), click on ?copy? and then on ?paste? in the ?edit? bar. A window will appear and there should be a ?save as? button there. Save this texture somewhere as a .bmp named ?window1?. Open this .bmp and replace the white glass/plastic squares with yellow squares, but be careful not to cover the black rail. Save this as ?projection1.bmp?. Import the projection texture and delete the old ?window1? one, since you already have it in the HL.wad.
(Or you can use Wally to put it into a new WAD, which might be a better idea- Lep.)
3. Select the func_wall and give it the skylight texture, then copy and paste it. Change the copied entity into a func_illusionary and change its texture to our new ?projection1? (the new texture should fit it perfectly).
4. Rotate the func_illusionary so that it will be parallel with the floor, then make it thinner. Move the illusionary right on the surface of the floor and set its rendermode additive and rendernt about 30 (depends on the time of day- use some trial and error to get it right). This will be the projection of the light that passes through the window.
If the projection intersects a wall, cut its edge where it meets up with the wall?s surface. Select the newly separated brush, rotate and move it until it looks in line with the rest of the projection.
If you get this right, you should have a cool lighting effect. This is how this concept looks in my map, de_Holland :
Sweet, ?eh? The whole thing is that when you have a window texture, you can make its projection texture in any image editor (I used windows98 paint). If the texture has rails, like the one I have, all you have to do is draw black lines in the appropriate pattern, since black is not 'rendered' on additive entities. Also, the projection color should be set according to the time of day, so a night projection should be dark blue (or gray if there?s a full moon up on the sky), yellow at dusk and dawn, bright yellow during the day. It's that easy.
Oh, another hint, regarding fans: lets say you?ve got a 3 bladed fan in an airduct that leads to the surface. You can make it passable and then copy the 3 blades and make them flat?like a shadow and give them the black texture. Then place it on the surface of the floor under the fan so they rotate together.
since it has been done 2,000,000 times before and most mappers are sick of it.
1. First, get a room (or make one) and make some (window) holes and add func_wall windows with their rendernt about 100 and rendermode texture.
2. Enter the texture browser, find and select the skylight texture (under ?lights?, do?h!), click on ?copy? and then on ?paste? in the ?edit? bar. A window will appear and there should be a ?save as? button there. Save this texture somewhere as a .bmp named ?window1?. Open this .bmp and replace the white glass/plastic squares with yellow squares, but be careful not to cover the black rail. Save this as ?projection1.bmp?. Import the projection texture and delete the old ?window1? one, since you already have it in the HL.wad.
(Or you can use Wally to put it into a new WAD, which might be a better idea- Lep.)
3. Select the func_wall and give it the skylight texture, then copy and paste it. Change the copied entity into a func_illusionary and change its texture to our new ?projection1? (the new texture should fit it perfectly).
4. Rotate the func_illusionary so that it will be parallel with the floor, then make it thinner. Move the illusionary right on the surface of the floor and set its rendermode additive and rendernt about 30 (depends on the time of day- use some trial and error to get it right). This will be the projection of the light that passes through the window.
If the projection intersects a wall, cut its edge where it meets up with the wall?s surface. Select the newly separated brush, rotate and move it until it looks in line with the rest of the projection.
If you get this right, you should have a cool lighting effect. This is how this concept looks in my map, de_Holland :
Sweet, ?eh? The whole thing is that when you have a window texture, you can make its projection texture in any image editor (I used windows98 paint). If the texture has rails, like the one I have, all you have to do is draw black lines in the appropriate pattern, since black is not 'rendered' on additive entities. Also, the projection color should be set according to the time of day, so a night projection should be dark blue (or gray if there?s a full moon up on the sky), yellow at dusk and dawn, bright yellow during the day. It's that easy.
Oh, another hint, regarding fans: lets say you?ve got a 3 bladed fan in an airduct that leads to the surface. You can make it passable and then copy the 3 blades and make them flat?like a shadow and give them the black texture. Then place it on the surface of the floor under the fan so they rotate together.
