Complicated light source

<div style="text-align: left;">So I'm trying to create a very specific type of light that's going into
my map. I need a long chain of connected light tubes that illuminate
uniformly.











If you take a look at this picture, the tube-lights on the ceiling are exactly what I'm trying for.





So here's my dilemma. I'm going to have to create a custom texture
because Source has nothing close to what I need - should I try using a
.rad file with my texture, or maying using $selfillum and a chain of
point lights?





If a long brush textured to my satisfaction can emit light smoothly and
consistantly along the entire surface, I'd prefer that route if it's
less expensive than a lot of point lights (which probably won't look
right?)..





Any help is appreciated.</div>

You want texture lights, or a glowing texture:
The how to

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

a long func_illusionary brush, set to not render, and textured with 'white001', is better than point lights. it will give a softer, more even result. alter the brightness by changing the scale of the texture. the lower the scales, the brighter the light.

you don't see this in game, so you'd use it in conjuntion with a 'selfillum' texture for the apparent light source.

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i eat paint

Sorry, how do I proceed with getting a long func_illusionary brush?

I was thinking a brush and then tie to entity but that doesn't seem to be it.

Hmm? You don't have func_illusionary in your entity list?

Hmm? You don't have func_illusionary in your entity list?

No sir. What shall I do?

You can just use a func_brush set to "Never Solid" and "Don't Render" for the same effect, I guess.

Some images in this post have been automatically down-sized, click on them to view the full sized versions:

I've been procrastinating on compiling my map and seeing the new
lighting because it takes so long (cordoning wouldn't help), so I did a
small little test map to see if this thing is going to work.

I've tried both a fun_illusionary and a func_brush through tie to entity, with your suggestions ie, Solidity set to Never Solid and Render Mode set to Dont Render, I've tried both letting them render and no results with any of them.

My point light was the only lighting the map got. The compile log reported there was only 1 direct light.



What am I doing wrong?

The func_brush or illusionary needs to have the self luminating texture on it (lights/white001)

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Posting And You

They were both textured with lights/white001..

Four suggestions to try, in descending order of desperation:

1) Make sure VBSP isn't reporting any leaks and that you're running VVIS on the map as well. I believe texture lighting requires both of those.

2) Try the other lights\white00x textures.

3) Edit the lights.rad in whatever mod you're mapping (for example, for HL2, go to \half-life 2\hl2\lights.rad) in a text editor, maybe WordPad, and go to the line that reads lights\white001. The four numbers after are the corresponding light settings for that texture. Try bumping up the fourth number to something like 1000 or 2000, just to make sure your texture lighting is working and that it's simply not because it's too dim to see.

4) Check the Kleiner lab VMF included with the SDK. Near the beginning in the basement brick area before the actual lab room, there is a boarded-up window with a white func_illusionary that uses this function. Copy and paste the setup into your map and adjust to your needs.

Sigh.. I'm getting extremely discouraged with this. Nothing works.

I've been trying to get it working in a test map which I have uploaded
here.

I have 9 brushes tied to func_illusionary entities, each one of them textured with a different lights/whitex texture.

white, white001, white001_nochop, white002, white003, white003_nochop, white004, white004_nochop, white005.

I've tried texture scales of 0.01 and 2.0 just for the hell of it, and
they don't work. They are all set up to Don't Render. I've had them
tied to func_brush with Never Solid and Don't Render and that doesn't
work.

lights.rad (only 32 bytes) opened with Notepad, Wordpad or Microsoft Word all show only one line:

xeno/crys_4b 255 160 128 40000

I've searched my entire 10.6 GB HL2 directory for all .vmf files and I see nothing that looks like the Kleiner lab.

cries