Can I have shadows without light?

[Sapphire Luna]

Characters don't cast shadows by default, right? I have to create a light to have my shadows, but I don't need a light.
What I'm trying to say is, I'm satisfied by the default light, but I want the characters to have shadows. A new light makes the scene too bright. And of course turning down the intensity to decrease the brightness also makes the shadows decrease.

Is there a way to decrease the light intensity without affecting the shadow intensity? I tried all the sliders but couldn't get anything satisfying.

[R234]

Nope. Map lighting is baked and cannot be toned down, and Source's awful looking dynamic shadows are irremediably off in SFM.

You can always use a very dim light, and maybe slightly reduce tonemapscale on the camera. You'll get noticeable shadows and the scene will not look all that much brighter.

[Sapphire Luna]

Ah darn.
I wish SFM was more like Maya =(

[Zappy]

What I do is make a light have very low intensity, very low shadowFilterSize, and no shadowAtten (or whatever), and point it at where I need shadows. An example of what it can look like if done right:
http://youtu.be/rWMK3Elph_0
Sadly, the shadow isn't that dark, but at least it looks better than no shadows at all. If done right.

[Sapphire Luna]

Sadly that doesn't work for me. If the intensity is low, I see no shadow at all. Or almost none. Regardless if the other settings

[Anomi]

You could try using a dark map, then applying all needed lighting by yourself (set the brightness of light_environment to 0 in Hammer, then recompile the map) But this can be a pain since Source has a limit to how many dynamic lights you can have at once. I would only really reccomend this if the area you are shooting in, is small and compact, and could be fully lit by 4, maybe 5 dynamic lights at the most.

[Zappy]

I didn't say "0" intensity, more like the values of "0.01" to "0.05" or so, maybe.

[Thespikedballofdoom]

Originally posted by R234:

Nope. Map lighting is baked and cannot be toned down, and Source's awful looking dynamic shadows are irremediably off in SFM.

You can always use a very dim light, and maybe slightly reduce tonemapscale on the camera. You'll get noticeable shadows and the scene will not look all that much brighter.

Not entirely. I just found the command sfm_drawpuppetblobbyshadows 1. I used to think it didn't work because when I first used it my map had no shadow control on it.

You can use this to get a kind of minecraft-like blobby shadow under your model by default, but you might have to do ent_create shadow_control first to make sure there's logic to cast them. They look like the shadows you'd get with cl_blobbyshadows 1.

The shadow will vaguely scale around the size of the model, but they aren't 2d-projection accurate like the nice dynamic shadow system real entities use. Still looks better than excessive light ruining map lighting imo though

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2814421641
The medkit in the middle uses the actual dynamic shadows from the game for comparison.
The shadow with nothing above it is a medkit far into the ground (they don the same bugs that the dynamic shadow system uses), it's as dark as it gets with these shadows.

[Rafe McCawley]

Originally posted by Thespikedballofdoom:

Originally posted by R234:

Nope. Map lighting is baked and cannot be toned down, and Source's awful looking dynamic shadows are irremediably off in SFM.

You can always use a very dim light, and maybe slightly reduce tonemapscale on the camera. You'll get noticeable shadows and the scene will not look all that much brighter.

Not entirely. I just found the command sfm_drawpuppetblobbyshadows 1. I used to think it didn't work because when I first used it my map had no shadow control on it.

You can use this to get a kind of minecraft-like blobby shadow under your model by default, but you might have to do ent_create shadow_control first to make sure there's logic to cast them. They look like the shadows you'd get with cl_blobbyshadows 1.

The shadow will vaguely scale around the size of the model, but they aren't 2d-projection accurate like the nice dynamic shadow system real entities use. Still looks better than excessive light ruining map lighting imo though

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2814421641
The medkit in the middle uses the actual dynamic shadows from the game for comparison.
The shadow with nothing above it is a medkit far into the ground, it's as dark as it gets with these shadows.

You are a real savior mate, with your advises, rendering shadows on night theme map shall not be massacre anymore with excessive lighting, and also could help to give more lights in settings without using too much memory, especially when we animated things, with those console commands, it shall be highly easier to make animation without using too much memory due to big use of lights.