1. Introducing the Lightmap
2. Special Indoor Lighting Effects
3. Fine-tuning Outdoor Lights

Setting light_environment Angle to Correspond to Sky Texture

An outdoor area in your map has a dramatic effect on aesthetics and ambiance, but it takes a few compiles to get it right. First, we need to save and compile the map to figure out which direction is East relative to our architecture.

[img=]

You'll notice that even though we do have a spectacular sky, something doesn't look quite right. That's because there is no sunlight coming from the sky texture. We don't have a light_environment entity in our map yet. Ignore that inconsistency for now and walk around in the map a bit. You'll notice that the sky toward *** is brighter, which means that's where the sun is setting. Remember the direction, because when we return to Hammer, we need to make our light_environment setting correspond to that.

Once we have our firstmap opened up again in Hammer,

Adjusting Ambient Light