Textured Lighting

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Textured Lighting

Postby Tutorial on Mon Mar 07, 2005 10:29 pm

category
General Half-Life 2/Lighting

description
It's still here even though almost defunct.

keywords
light, lights, texture, textured.

This is not a tutorial about textured lights, but rather a tutorial about the placement of the lights.rad file for the source SDK. For an actual tutorial about textured lights you can go to the following url for a tutorial written by Blink a while back, http://www.cs-maps.org/index.php?page=t ... lights.htm

Textured lights for the source SDK are exactly the same as before (to the best of my knowledge). So create a new text file.

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Now open up the text file and enter in the standard texture light information, that is the name of the texture, an RGB value for the color of the light, and the lights brightness.

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Now go to file>save as and save the file as lights.rad

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The lights.rad file goes into the "game directory". If you are unsure of what your game directory is, open up hammer and go to tools>options>game configurations> and the game directory is in the second to last box.

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Here is a sample of textured lights in a map. The lights are set a little bright, but since there is no light entity in the room you can see that it is working properly.

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I am not entirely sure if this is correct, all I know is that after a half hour of trial and error I found the proper folder for me which is C:\Valve\SteamApps\***@sfuhs.org\sourcesdk\cstrike_sample_content.
This folder also happens to be my game directory folder.

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Postby theangriestbadger on Tue Nov 01, 2005 12:12 am

I couldn't get the above method to work quite right, I think things are a little different for source to get this working. Just creating a lights.rad file did not work and the compiler couldn't find the lights.rad file.

You'll need to download GCFscape (google it) and hunt down the lights.rad file in the GCF files for the game you want to use the texlights in (I think they lurk in the games folder within sourcesdk or sourcesdk_content). Extract the lights.rad file to your SteamApps\username\sourcesdk\bin folder (I also put it in the game folder just to be safe, i.e. counterstrikesource\cstrike).

Then just put in the texture name and brightness settings like in the tutorial above.

If you also want the texture itself to be illuminated as well as giving off light then open your texture in photoshop duplicate one of the RGB channels (one that looks closest to greyscale) and name this channel Alpha 1 and save it, make sure the 'include alpha channels' box is checked. This is a lazy way to do it btw but it works for me just fine. Once you have vtexed the texture edit the vmt like so it looks a little like this (obviously you can change surface prop or add other stuff you need) -

"LightmappedGeneric"
{
"$baseTexture" "texturedirectoryl/texturename"
"$surfaceprop" "glass"
"$selfillumtexture" "texturedirectoryl/texturename"
"$selfillum" 1

}
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Postby SeveG on Thu Jul 13, 2006 8:23 pm

in my SteamAcountname/half life 2/hl2 is already a lights.rad and i can't change it, so what do i have to do, where do i have to place

"CustomTextures/texturename 35 210 22 50"

Because placing a lights.rad file somewhere else doesn't make sense.....
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Postby MayheMsg on Mon Mar 05, 2007 4:41 pm

if you can not change it look into the propwreties of the file it may be checked as read only. If it is a matter of not benig able to open it just right click and open it in notepad. then you can go to town...
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Postby BaRRaKID on Tue Mar 13, 2007 3:42 pm

this tut is not for source...
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Postby slayera on Tue Mar 13, 2007 6:19 pm

BaRRaKID wrote:this tut is not for source...



Hmm, cause I have been using this for source without a problem. It's legacy stuff, but it still works fine.
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Re: Textured Lighting

Postby warlord on Thu May 21, 2009 7:15 am

in my experience texture lights are not really texture lights.
what ive noticed when i tried to make a thin light effect that looked like it came from under a handrail is that there wasnt a uniform glow on the floor. it seemed to have bolder areas than others.
so to me what is really happening is when you use one of these textures the compiler puts a regular light in its place every few units and makes the brightness based on the textures code.

is this a problem? no not really but it does seem like they are unnessessary now.
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Re: Textured Lighting

Postby Oskmos on Tue Nov 29, 2011 12:17 pm

nice!
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Re: Textured Lighting

Postby stoopdapoop on Sat Dec 08, 2012 6:51 am

it's bullshit that we can't report posts in the tutorials section.
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Re: Textured Lighting

Postby Armageddon on Sat Dec 08, 2012 7:34 am

or news.
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