Directed Light Effect

<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Hi,
I am having problems getting a light to shine its beam right.
www.aleronsdomain.com/light_how_to.jpg
As you can see in this picture, the light does not shine in the right manner for this prop.
I would like the light to shine with a distinct dark outline where the red lines are.
Can anyone tell me how to do this?
</span>

To get exactly what you want, Turtle Rock Studios cheated (very creatively) in a way when making maps for Counter_Strike Source; What they did was they actually made transparent decals and placed them behind the props on the walls, to make it seem like the lights were radiating in that manner when they really weren't. Because they did that, they didn't have to worry about making small scale lightmaps, which would have been 10x more costly to run (and compile).

You have several options here.

<OL TYPE=1>

• Leave the light as is, and select the texture to the wall behind it, and give it a lightmap setting of 4 or smaller. (most expensive way) NOTE: you will also need to do the third option too in order to get the desired effect.
• Actually go into Photoshop, or some image editing program with alpha channels, and create a transparent decal that looks like light being cast on a wall.
• Or you could actually attempt to shaped the light by using the "block light" texture on various sized brushes to make the light cast shadows to give you your hour glass shape upon the wall.

</OL>

Either way, you should disable all shadows from that prop on the wall, cause it's just gonna look dark because the way the light is placed to it.

The best looking and most optimized way to do this would be the Photoshop way, (with a decal).

Here's an example of what Source can do with shadows when you have the lightmap scale turned down :wink:



That was done by using options 1 and 3.

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

<span style="color: white;">Thanks, I did not know about light map settings before for some reason.

Do you know a free program that can create the decals like that? Or what photoshop do you mean? Jasc or Painshop Pro, and what version?
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You could try downloading GIMP, it's a free image editing program that has some of the features available in photoshop and paintshop, like alpha channels and layers.