model lighting question

I made a dynamic model the the player rides in, like the train in hl2's start, but not brushwork. The problem Im having is that the interior of the model has its lighting sampled from the light _env, as the outside should be. I can't seem to fake a nice interior light.

Here's what I've tried:

• light_dynamic parented to the model, placed inside; results in a overbright pulse no matter what I enter in its controls
• static light with an override parent field
• a string of static lights, this actually got the closest, except the light centre was visible passing thru the vehicle
• a huge static light with constant set to 500000, 50% falloff and 0% set to 1 unit apart

None of the above has worked acceptably. Is there no way to light a moving model besides static/light_env?

The only thing I haven't tried is reconverting the player area to func_tracktrain or brush, but they bring their own lighting issues.

Have you tried a texture light?

Muhnay said:
Have you tried a texture light?

That's a good suggestion.

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

texture based light I have tried, yes, right after I posted this.... The model will be lit properly until it moves out of the light radius. The parented textures themselves remain 'fullbright' but cast no rays

How about faking it with illuminated parts baked into the texture shader for the model? This sure sounds like the kind of thing that brings the Source engine to its knees...

lol yeah thats for sure. I have a record of breaking engine components so this will probably be no different. Performance is secondary here tho as I'm scrambling to meet the competition deadline.

By illuminated parts baked into the texture shader, you mean use $selfillum in the vmt? If so, that's an easy trial run, I'll check that later.

Tried experimenting with info_lighting?

You might have to split the model in two, the exterior body and the interior body. That way you could easily have the exterior lit with the light_environment and specify with the into_lighting the lighting for the interior body.

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Aaron's Stuff

Yup tried the info_lighting scenario, not working...which is odd, I guess it's because it's a dynamic prop on the move. I have not tried changing it to _phys_override w/info_lighting yet because there's no parent field but that's easy to try too.

In reality your suggestion of splitting the model is probably the best way except the geometry makes it prohibitive.

...thanks for the replies all. I think I'll probably reassess the whole vehicular thing, I guess this is one reason we don't see too much of it in Source

You could make the train brush based or a mixture of brushes and models and parent everything together.

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Aaron's Stuff

Yup Aaron thats what I did, in conjunction with a pile of blocklight for the baking stage. It's come a long way, now to get the cubemaps to function a little better...