Need help with raytracing...

I really want to get this effect and have spent the last 6 hours tring to get this. There aren't too many maps that sport this effect; a simple raytrace effect.

See the attachments...

You won't believe how grateful I'd be is someone could help me with this - I have looked at every single property, every setting, the wiki, searched the forums - I can't seem to figure this one out.

Thanks!

It actually has to do with the lightmap detail setting in the surface properties when you hit F5. It's default setting is 32. It needs to go down to 1 or 2.

I did try a projector, but it does'nt have the same flavor.

Thanks for the reply!

Yes. The problem I had was solved.

Per my reply above, shadows cast on BSP by mesh or BSP are made sharp and clear by lowering the setting of the lightmap in the surface property settings.

Thanks to Nick for helping me with that.

Blue Eyes - I'm sorry, that is incorrect. I tried that. The reason it works from skylights has nothing to do with the light type.

The light you see in the screen shot has a radius of 4 or 5. All the rest of the settings are default, with the exception of the color.

When I was experimenting, I had set the light radius to 255 to see what would happen. I got the nice shadows on walls that were over 250 units away from the source, and they were large as you would expect. In the screen shot, the light radius is a mere 4 or 5. And see how crisp the shadow is? that is due to the LightMap setting being set from a 32(default) to a 1.

It was also pointed out to me that in addition to setting the lightmap property to 1 or 2, that if you needed the shadow even sharper, to add another brush that is only large enough to accept the shadow and set the lightmap resolution to 1.

Kyouryuu - I have spent more than 6 hours experimenting with all these settings and also learned that when dealing with the meshes that have an alpha channel (i.e. chain linked fence) that channel is used to create the shadow. Still though, the lightmap setting must be there. If you take and make a room with one light, the chainlink fence mesh and set the lightmap res to one, you'll see that it does create the criss-cross shadow. I'd post a screen-shot to demonstrate, but I'm at work so I can't right now - maybe later tonite.

I did accomplish the effect with projectors, but as you will see that if you do that there are 2 things to deal with:

1. You need to set up you tex with a transparent gradient to get the 'fade out over distance' and you have a butload of extra textures and projectors for every shadow you want and
2. The 'flavor' is too 'artificial'. It's tough to explain, but the nearest analogy I can come up with is to watch StarWars (the 70's one). Remember when R2 and 3PO are in the Jawa transport? There was a texture to all that that was definately NOT reproduced in any of the '1st' to episodes. It's akin to the difference between a practical model of a starship (i.e. the Roger Young or Imperial star destroyer of StarWars) versus the 'shiny silver' Princess Amadala's ship.

There is no comparison. Not to say that there isn't use, but I want my map to have that gritty BSP surface shadow, not the projected shadow.

Thanks