Need help fixing dark surfaces

[KD]

I am getting black surfaces instead of textures on some brushes. I have ambient light set to 25 25 25 and 4 point lights in the room. There are no errors when I compile. If I tweek the values of the ambient light then the surfaces that are black change to different locations. Take a look at the pillars in the following image. Can someone help me with this?

Thanks,
KD

[pjw]

This might be a shot in the dark (har), but I'm wondering if perhaps the origins on your point lights might be co-planer with the dark surfaces? It looks like at least one might be pretty close on z, judging from the hot spot on the far right...

If light origins are coplanar with a surface, you can sometimes get oddness...

[Hipshot]

Don't use ambient light.
Compile with bounce 8 and see what happens =)

[Shallow]

Duplicate plane errors sometimes look like this as well, but I've never seen a bunch of them acting like this so close together. Still, running brush cleanup never hurt anyone!

BTW like Hipshot says, best not to use ambient. If you must then use it with care, and give it a subtle tint not just a flat grey, grey will always absolutely kill any interesting colours in the lighting.

[MaxGaMin]

unless you are mapping for cpma or defrag as such. :icon32:

[pjw]

Adding my vote to the "ambient is kinda iffy" crowd. I should have said that in my original post.

Even when mapping for CPMA/Defrag/whatever, you can usually get a very well-lit map even without ambient and it will often look better; it just takes a bit more work.