External Lightmaps and patches

[Bliccer]

Hey,
I finally got my first external lightmap to work and the map looks so much better, now.
Still I have two problems:

1. Patches

The curves are patches of course, the rest around are brushes. As you can see there are nasty lines between the patches and the brushes. I already tried to replace the brushes with patches and align them properly but it didn't work. Andy idea what I can do? I can't find those mean shadows in the lightmap files, though. If I use non-lightmapped textures for the patches they will just look boring and weird, since there will be 1024² shadows connected to 128² ones.

2. Lights appearing

Suddenly there are lights appearing inside of brushes (columns) where there are certainly no light entities or textures at all. Any idea how I can get rid of them? I don't know which red bounced off lights are the ones inside of the lightmap pics. If I would know I could just paint over them...

[bst]

Patches:

Maybe try adding the brushes which are casting the shadows to a func_group and set the shadow caster level to 0.

Lights appearing:

No idea, but if all else fails you could put a flaming torch there, at least it wouldn't look strange any more.

[Bliccer]

Lights: Thanks bst for the idea, but torches don't fit. It seems that I've erased them anyway by deleting some of those moving particles I have in my map.
Patches: Hm I'm going to try that. But I think it will also affect the lights being emitted onto those brushes, then?

[Johnny Law]

When you said "I already tried to replace the brushes with patches and align them properly but it didn't work" ... what exactly didn't work there?

[Bliccer]

When I used the brushes next to the patches I thought the texture wasn't set correctly. So I replaced them with patches and used the cap function. In the editor it looks properly aligned at the seam, still I get black lines there, as shown in the screenshot.

[obsidian]

The issue I think is that Q3Map2 isn't using the 2 surfaces as a single lightmap page. Try func_grouping the patch and brush together and make sure you are caulking behind patch surfaces. You can also try creating a new shader using q3map_lightmapMergable and apply it to both patches and brush.

[Bliccer]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH OH JOYFUL WORLD! It works. Mergeable did the job. obsidian.
Does it make sense to convert each "room" into func_groups or only details where needed?

[Bliccer]

Now I have another problem with different patches...
When I compile my map it suddenly looks as if my patches are not aligning to their caps anymore. The strange thing is that when I compiled it one month ago everything worked fine. Back then I think I've used q3map2 2.5.16 and not the one gtkradiant 1.5 ships with (2.5.17?)... but I am not 100% sure. Can it be that version 17 is a bit buggy or odd compilingwise?

[obsidian]

You only need to func_group as necessary or when convenient.

Not sure about the cap issue, the latest version is the one included with GtkRadiant 1.6.x. Give that version a try or you can revert to the standalone Q3Map2 2.5.16 and see if that still produces the same results.

[Bliccer]

Hm, it seems that the q3map_mergeable is only working for horizontal patch/Brushes. All vertical patches are not merging.

Patch_1
Patch_2

In both pics there is caulk behind the patches and they are only grouped to the next brush on the left and right. I don't want to go back to normal textures for those patches... the turquoise light looks so bad ass on them
Hm... or I need to add 2 rows and create the wall with one patch...

[obsidian]

That's because it works with co-planar surfaces, which your walls are not.

To be honest, I can't really tell that you're using much higher resolution lightmaps, perhaps stick with standard internal lightmaps for those surfaces and just bump up the lightmap scale?

[Bliccer]

K. Then I am going to replace thosewalls witch one patch.

Yes, it's hard to tell from the resized screens. But if you compare the green lights from the last screen to the one in the first patches screen (on the patches), then you can see a great difference in crispiness and diversation of fall-off.