VHV

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VHV files (Valve Hardware Verts) stores pre-baked vertex colors used for "per-vertex" static prop lighting, in a format designed to be very cheap to upload to the GPU.

Description from public/materialsystem/hardwareverts.h:

// Contains data purposely formatted for a dma copy into a D3D Vertex Buffer.
// The file is divided into two partitions, the foremost contains the static
// portion (header), the latter contains the streamable compliant portion.
// The streamable component starts and ends on a sector (512) aligned boundary.
// The header identifies the vertex format of the data and the atomic sizes of each component.
// The hierarchial mesh is flattened for dma but the vertex counts are available
// per mesh to transfer each mesh individually.

Due to their purpose-formatted nature, they are not particularly reusable. Third party VRAD compilers^[Clarify] should be used if desiring to use custom vertex colors in a way that wouldn't normally be generated by VRAD's static prop lighting calculations.

See also

• PPL, the equivalent for lightmapped props