Valve Hammer Lighting issue Thread

I have a lighting/shadowing issue with light_spot entities. I cannot describe it with words, so here are screenshots of the issue.

(I just registered to this site, so I cant post URLs for 7 days. Just remove the "@"s from the urls )

Hammer Editor view:
p@uu.s@h/@Gzow

In-Game view:
p@uu.s@h/@Gz@oG

Why does the shadow look like that? How can I fix this? I have built all cubemaps btw.

You can improve it by changing the lightmap scale of the textures that the light is projected on. The default value for light map scale is 16, try lowering the value (But keep it to the power of 2 so 2,4,6,8...etc)

Remember though, this doesn't mean select all textures in the map and put the value to 2 because hammer will throw a hissy fit xD Instead try only lowering it on the walls that make the most impact to the player. The ones that make it look good.

Also it's kind of hard to tell but maybe the light is clipping the strobe light mesh you're using. Maybe trying lowering the light_spot and then see if it renders strangely again. If it does try using those lower lightmap values.

Another thing that might be throwing it is your brush work. I'm guessing you'll already know this but try and make the least amount of cuts in your brushwork so that you keep the vertices to a minimum. If a seam in the brush is running along that straight shadow, that may be what's causing it. It's unlikely but still worth a try if you're out of luck.

That's all I can think of what it could be really. Let me know how it goes, GL!