Lightmap

A lightmap is the surface on top of each face that stores all the lighting information of a face. Especially common in BSP based engines it is addativley applied to each face to produce the final lit effect.

Determined during the vrad compile proccess lightmaps are only applied to brush faces as models are lit differently. The lightmap's value is the size of each pixel of light (luxel) that the lightmap stores. Smaller values means smaller luxels, thus a better resoultion and quality but higher files size and compile times. The lightmap resolution can be viewed within Hammer by altering the viewmode in the top right to lightmap. The following are the console commands related to lightmaps.

mat_filterlightmaps
mat_showlightmapcomponent
mat_showlightmappage
r_avglightmap
r_lightmap

Todo: create and add images of different lightmap resoultions