Making Light Beams

Ok, we've all seen the light beams on maps such as cs_havana. But how are they made? Well, look no further, other than this page!



1) First of all, make a street lamp or vehicle where a light is going to appear from. I'm going to be using an APC using textures from the half-life.wad. Here:



Now, this has some lights on the front. So I am going to use these to show how you can get a light beam.

2) Since I am using an APC, I will use entity lights. I could use textured lights, but that would mean the whole APC would emit light! 

(blinks note- You could make seperate blocks at the front for the lights and use textured lights on there)

So, insert two light entities and two info_target entities like this:



Set the entities up as follows:

Light1
-Target - spot1

Light2
-Target - spot2

Give the info_targets the name set in the target field of the light entity. 

3) Next, to create the light beam that will appear. To do this, go to your texture browser (assuming halflife.wad is being used), type FADE into the filter box. You will be presented with 2 textures, FADE and FADE2. It doesn't matter which one you use for this. Ill be using FADE2. Now, set up a brush like this:


The FADE texture works as follows:

The light areas are where the beam is strongest, the darker areas is where the beam loses strength. So the dark areas MUST be at the furthest point away from the light source. We'll set it up as an entity in a minute, but first we must make it into a proper shape of a beam.

Use the Clip tool on the FADE brush until you get something like this:



The beam will now appear as a proper light will in real life. 

4) Now, select the FADE brush and press Ctrl + t. From the drop down list, choose func_illusionary and set it with the following properties:

-Render Mode - Set this to Additive
-FX Amount - Set this to a value between 30 and 120. 30 is a less strong beam than 120. I'm using 50 for my example. I'm saying 120 max, as otherwise it will be too bright!

Now, copy the brush for the other light on the APC and compile:





(blinks note- if you want to have fade where you can see the bottom add the "black" texture to the bottom to make it invisible)

Now, this can also be done with textured lights. See Blinks tutorial on Textured Lights and set one up. Then, simply set up the fade brush with the textured light. No entity lights are needed either. 
This example was done with a textured light, and the FX amount set to 120.



This is a much stronger beam of light than the APC. The strength is personal preference really. Best to experiment with it.
A further extension is to include the light halos on the lights. See Blinks tutorial on Light Halos for more information on these.

 

By The God