Ugly jagged shadows...

Hey, say I have a cylinder with like 16 sides. It's standing
straight up and casting a shadow, sound good? No... The
shadow is faceted very badly and has lines where each degradation
should be instead of fading like it should. I've tried lowering
the luxels from 16 all the way to 1 but it still doesn't help.
Anyone know why this happens? I've used fast RAD and VIS and full
RAD and VIS and it happens no matter what :-/ Sometimes the
shadows look like utter crap too! PLEEEEEASE help :sad:

When you tested your map, did you have Hammer running in the background? I have experienced similar "ugly shadow" problem when I run Hammer and Half-Life 2 at the same time. I don't know whether it's a computer resource issue, but when I run Half-Life 2 alone, the problem goes away.

No its because the legs of the bench are cutting up the lower brush (you can see how it cuts it up).

This is a common n00b mapper mistake. Either turn the legs into a
entity (wall or detail) or raise the legs the smallest unit off the
ground so it doesnt cut up the floor, then compile again.

I'm trying it out...thanks for the response. I also accidentally marked that your answer was wrong but it's right :-/

omegaslayer's answer is correct - your ground place is clearly being
cut up by the leg brushes touching them. Either lift the brushes off
the plane by 1 or more units, or make them a func_wall or func_detail.

[Edit: And you've edited your response as I posted mine :smile: ]

But what you're saying is that they have to either be floating 1pt off the ground, or cast no shadows?!

Or you can make the bottom portions of the legs (the part that touches
the floor) all func_wall and have the remainder of the legs cast
shadows.

wow, that's very time consuming and brush wasting don't you think? for something as simple as that...? :-/

But what you're saying is that they have to either be floating 1pt off the ground, or cast no shadows?!

They will cast shadows if they are func_walls or detail, those just dont block VIS.

BTW you can reset the answers thing, but im sure a mod will change that.

Can someone clarify this for me: when NOT to use a func_detail? I
know you're supposed to use them for small objects, a la detail entities,
but when does the "detail" entity get too big and require a func_brush
or just being a world brush? I know there aren't really any right
or wrong answers for this, but any comments?

func_detail: Anything that you dont want to block vis, you dont want to
cut up surfaces, nothing is too big, like i have some stairs that are
detail that are 10x the size of the player, they help to calculate vis
(since detail doesnt cut up vis) ill write a tut on how to optimize
your map soon, just cant right now.