Volumetric Lights

Volumetric lights can make your map look more realistic.

     If you haven' got a good light to put the volume on, create a brush (128*32*8) and apply the base_light/baslt4_1_2k shader to the down-face, the other faces should be covered with non-light texture. Oh, by the way, if you didn't know it before, you can rotate a texture by pressing Shift PageUp or Shift PageDown. To make the volume light, make a brush that covers the inner part of the texture. Pull the bottom edges out, using the edge tool (press 'E'). The brush should now be inthe shape of your soon to be volumelight. Now apply the sfx/beam shader to your brush (it is easier to just type sfx/beam in the Surface Inspector press s to actually browse it). Since this texture is too small for our brush, we will have to resize it, do this in the surface inspector by changing the value of vertical stretch. You can use different parts of the texture depending on how bight you want your light, today we will align the top edge of the texture to the top edge of the brush, and the bottom edge with the brush's bottom edge. We only want the gradient on the side of the brush, so now we are going to hide the top and bottom faces of the brush. Move the brush down a bit so that you can see the top face of it, apply the common/nodraw texture to the top and bottom face of the brush. Move the brush back to its original position. Now load your map and you have a volumetric light!

• (you don't need to do this step if you don't want to.) Make an object with a light shader for the bottom face.

• Create a brush that will outline where the light shines, and give it the sfx/beam texture, then line it up. and taper it, or whatever you want the shape of the beam to be.

• Apply the common/nodraw texture to the bottom and top faces of the brush.

• Place the brush where the light will be shining (under a lamp, in a crack in a wall, ceiling).