Smoothing groups?

[thomasfn]

Hey there. I'm having some troubles with smoothing groups, and lighting in general.

[img]http://www.fortfn.co.uk/images/basething20000.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.fortfn.co.uk/images/basething20001.jpg[/img]

The curved ceiling consists of two brushes, one for each half. Each face is mapped to smoothing group 1. No other brushes use smoothing group 1.

Please ignore shitty graphics. The fullbright metal things are an issue too, but I [i]think[/i] I know why that happened (I might have used model textures instead of brush textures).

Any ideas how to fix the lack of smoothing though?

[Firegod522]

Try checking out this.
[url]http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Hammer_Smoothing_Groups_Dialog[/url]

[thomasfn]

[QUOTE=Firegod522;22612424]Try checking out this.
[url]http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Hammer_Smoothing_Groups_Dialog[/url][/QUOTE]

I already looked at that, it didn't help. But what does it mean when it says lightmaps must be aligned?

[Firegod522]

I believe they mean the lightmap scale has to be the same for them.

[Miigga]

[QUOTE=Firegod522;22612682]I believe they mean the lightmap scale has to be the same for them.[/QUOTE]

no

It means this:

[img]http://filesmelt.com/dl/lightmapalign.jpg[/img]

For alignment it is necessary for the lightmap scale to be the same, but having the same lightmap scale doesn't guarantee alignment as you can see in that image.

[Firegod522]

Oh that makes sense.

[brerben]

It can ALSO be that the lightmap scale is too large for the size of the polygon, which means that the lightmap doesn't have enough resolution to change from light to dark on the face of the brush.

The solution? Make the lightmap scale about 8, or even 6. For extremely small brushes, sometimes I even have to use a lightmap scale of 4.

[thomasfn]

Ok thanks, I'll try out your solutions. I don't think lightmap scale is the problem, as if you look 3/4 the way down the first screenshot you can see where a spotlight as lit up a section of the ceiling and you can tell there are plenty of luxels on each polygon of the ceiling.

[H.Grunt]

OP, use alt+right click when applying textures to curved ceilings. Example: put a texture the lowest section, select it, alt+right click on the next section, then select the next section, and so on.

[thomasfn]

[QUOTE=HGrunt;22633616]OP, use alt+right click when applying textures to curved ceilings. Example: put a texture the lowest section, select it, alt+right click on the next section, then select the next section, and so on.[/QUOTE]

Damn, now you tell me this right after I manually aligned all the textures and lightmaps.

[editline]04:18PM[/editline]

And there's no reason why the compiler should take 5 minutes to compile 7 square vis leafs...

[editline]04:22PM[/editline]

Alt+right click didn't work. It messed up the alignment BIG TIME, no lightmap or texture is aligned at all anymore, textures got stretched and rotated all over the place. I think I'll stick with manual alignment.