Environmental Lighting, Sun, Weather, & Outdoors
From Valve Developer Community
Topics directly relevant to making outdoor areas. (For general mapping help, see Category:Level Design.)
Articles
- Skybox (2D) — basic skies
- 3D Skybox — adding items (such as buildings) to the skybox
- Displacements — terrain (such as hills, cliffs, caves, and non-flat grass)
- Precipitation issues — to make sure your rain/snow works right.
Entities
- light_environment - Both Direct and Diffuse light coming from the skybox ("toolsskybox" texture).
- env_sun - places a glow sprite in the skybox to represent the sun itself.
- shadow_control - necessary to control the dynamic shadows cast by light_environment.
Note:light_environment, env_sun and shadow_control should be used together. Each entity represents only a one aspect of a naturally unified phenomenon; Sunlight. light_environment defines the direct sunlight settings and creates (buggy, unconfigurable) dynamic shadows which can only be overridden/controlled by shadow_control. env_sun places a glow sprite in the skybox where the sunlight comes from. To make sense of it all, just make sure that the <angles> (Pitch/Yaw/Roll) are set the same for all three entities. Unfortunately shadow_control does not have the Pitch override parameter, so its Pitch will be determined by the first of its <angles>. Even more unfortunately, the Pitch override rotation cannot be switched off and is measured counter-clockwise from the horizontal (so straight down is -90 degrees) whereas the <angles> Pitch is rotation is clockwise (so straight down is +90 degrees).- func_precipitation - brush-based entity for rain or snow.
- func_viscluster - for merging visleafs in large, open areas.
- For nature props check the
props_foliagefolder in Hammer Model Browser.
Materials
- Search for
naturein the Hammer Material Browser. - For smooth transitions between two types of material, such as grass to sand, use alpha blending with
blendmaterials.
