env_cubemaps

I'm having trouble with env_cubemaps. I can't seem to get any of my surfaces to be reflective. (I'm guessing thats what they do :biggrin: .) I placed a cubemap in a room and I targeted all the textures in the room with it. (I hope thats what I was supposed to do.) I left the size of the cubemap to default because when I messed with it, it would sometimes give me an error about my resolution being to high. I compile my map and enter the command buildcubemaps. It does something wierd and flashes screenshots of parts of my map in the upper left hand corner, and then spits me back into the console. And still none of my surfaces reflect anything. Do only certain textures reflect? Please help! Oh and to whom it may concern, I did search the site and have found nothing.

I'm pretty sure the only reflective shader in the game is that used on
the water. Other surfaces still use cubemaps though, as they relect
lighting rather than reflect the world. For example, if you have a
long, shiny wooden floor, and at one end it has strong white lighting
and the other strong red lighting, then the colour of the highlights
that move around with you on the floor will be different depending on
where you put your env_cubemap. You could probably make materials
reflect the world by making your own and, possibly, writing your own
shaders, but I don't think you're quite wanting to do that :smile:

My problem is I cant get any surfaces to reflect the light. There just bland. How do I get them to look like the texes in Half-Life 2?

It is defined by the material, and also depends on your DirectX level.
You can't force a material to be reflective through hammer, you need to
go and make your own material outside of it and use that. The textures
with the envmask property will make use of a cubemap in some way, and
you can use the filter checkboxes in the material browser to find them.

Check out sdk_cubemaps too, it's pretty nice...

If I understand you correctly, everything went just fine, including the
building of the cubemaps, you only don't see the results on the
surfaces after that?

Then I have to ask: have you restarted the map after building the
cubemaps? You didn't say in your post that you did that, while it's
necessary to see the results.

I was under the impression it did that when you started the map anyway- the updating node graph or whatever...

You don't have to reload your map after using the buildcudemaps command, it automatically does it (hence the delay after it has generated all of them). You do have to run the command though myrk, its not done automatically.

Basicly like I said before was I want the textures in my map to look like the ones in Half-Life 2. I know it can be done because I see the nice reflective textures when I play Half-Life 2. So how do you get them?

Did you try the sample map I posted? Every surface in that map has shiny bump-mapped goodness. Just run the full vbsp vvis vrad compile and then type buildcubemaps when you run the game and you have it.

How do you run full everything? Could I also get a link to your test map for the nice looking texes. :biggrin:

Everyone has the sample maps...they come with the SDK. Check under SDK Sample Content or something. As for the "full everything", I mean run vbsp, vvis, and vrad, and don't add -fast (or any other parameters for that matter).

I'll give it a try when I get home. (I'm at school right now.)