Environmental Lighting, Sun, Weather, & Outdoors

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Ammunition | Animals & Creatures | Antlions | Beams & Lasers | Cables & Ropes | Clouds & Sky | Color Theory | Combat | Combine | Compression | Doors | Dust, Fog & Smoke | Elevators | Level Transitions | Environmental Lighting & Weather | Explosions | Fire | Foliage | Glass & Windows | Headcrab | Health | Ladders | Lighting | Optimization (Level Design) | Physics | Retinal scanners | Sound & Music | Special effects | Terrain | Trains | Turrets | Water | Weapons | Zombie


Topics directly relevant to making outdoor areas. (For general mapping help, see Category:Level Design.)

Articles

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.pngNote: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).

Materials

  • Search for nature in the Hammer Material Browser.
  • For smooth transitions between two types of material, such as grass to sand, use alpha blending with blend materials.

See also

External links