Ydnar: What is causing this light problem?

[Matt]

At first the brush you see wasn't even showing up... it was being killed off by VIS. So I made it detail, along with the rest of the stairs (should have in the first place) and it came out but light made it funky, as you can see, and the patches around it have the odd shadow on them as well.......

Here's a pic of it, along side an r_lightmap 1 shot.

http://members.cox.net/mattswift/lightts.jpg

Here are my light settings.


-fast
-fastgrid
-filter
-patchshadows
-area 1.5
-point 1.5
-bounce 3
-super 2
-thresh .1

What gives?

[Emon]

My only suggestion is to delete that brush and the surrounding few stair brushes and rebuild them.

[Matt]

Done it twice.

[Emon]

Try removing those light params one at a time, they might affect it. Thresh looks suspicious, try it without.

[Matt]

I don't mean to sound like a meganewb, but I don't even know what Thresh does. I saw it was what someone else used on their ultra-high-quality compile settings...

[Emon]

thresh (n.n)
Thresh sets the recursive triangle subdivision threshold. The range is from 0.1 - 1.0. Default is 1.0


It sounds suspicious, take it out.

Also leave out the other high quality settings like bounce, super, and filter until your final compiles.

[Matt]

I'd like to see what the actual final version will look like... These extra settings alter the appearance of the lightmap, and where there could be a 'bug' in a standard compile, the full high-qual may not have it.

[Tweety]

Hey...

if aou experience brushes that are deleted by the bsp or vis, try little geometric changes. Make the stairs higher, perhaps 2 or 4 units, try using rectangle shaped stairs instead of trapezoid geometrics.
Problems with deleted brushes can also produce hall of mirror effects so you must avoid this. This might solve your lighting problem, too.

Tweety

[ydnar]

That problem will still be there even with a simple -light -fast. It's caused by a malformed brush--one that might not even be right there.

Were your stairs constructed by vertex manipulation or CSG subtract? If so, try deleting each nearby stair, one at a time, until the problem goes away. Then reconstruct each using the 2-pt clipper tool.

y

[Matt]

I rebuilt with the clipper tool. Still the same problem.

[Old_Fellow]

Your screenshots were made in vertex mode, did you try in lightmap mode?
What about running bobToolz brushcleanup?

[Matt]

Uh, NO, the screenshots are taken in lightmap mode. The screen on the right was taken with r_lightmap 1 on to show the shadow problem.

Bobtoolz does nothing a human being cannot do on his own. I believe it's a patchshadows+bounce problem. I'll test tomorrow sometime.

[Old_Fellow]

Bobtoolz does nothing a human being cannot do on his own.

Can you locate a phantom brush or duplicates planes?
I doubt it.
Most of the time bobToolz do the job.
In my opinion your problem comes out of the brushwork, not from Q3map2.
But that's just my opinion.

[Matt]

Welp, it is your opinion, because disabling -patchshadows takes it away.