Moon ray

[Zinski]

Been trying to make one of those delightfully enchanting moon beams I have seen in T:DS, but cannot for the life of me work out how. There's even one in the training mission for TDM (above where the book lectern is located in the starting area with the statues), however it doesn't appear to be a 'normal' light source. It's a strange composite of some model with the name tdm_moon_rays_med.prt but I did a quick search of my folders for that file and I don't appear to have it. It is also surrounded by a black, hollow cylinder called shaderparm7 at 0.8 setting.

 

Would someone be so kind as to explain how I could go about creating a directional, sparkly moonbeam such as this? I've checked the forums with the keywords 'moon ray' but nothing of any use has come up so far.

 

Cheers.

[ungoliant]

search the wiki / forums for information on particles. thats what the .prt extension stands for.

[Mortem Desino]

What I've often done made 1-3 concentric cylinder patchs, textured with darkmod/sfx/moon_light_rays.

 

Here's a prefab example for ye (just rename the extension to .pfb). Originally, it was used in a forest: moon beams streaming through the forest canopy. Rrl rrl pretty.

moon_rays.pfb.txt

[Zinski]

Sweet, thank you very much!

[Dram]

Don't forget to set its intensity with shaderParm7. I created it ages ago so that it is modifyable and could be faded in/out with triggers and a script. If you leave the material at default (which is shaderParm7 at 0) then it will be invisible.

 

EDIT: Nevermind, just noticed you already knew that

[Zinski]

How would I go about changing the size and shape of this prefab? I'm guessing scripting is involved here.

 

 

[Mortem Desino]

No, no scripting involved. It's a bunch of patches, so all you have to do is Select it, right-click, and "revert to worldspawn".

 

As worldspawn you can stretch it, rotate it, or use vertex editing mode (v) to change the shape.

[greebo]

You can also use TAB to select each of the entity's child patches without reverting the entire thing to worldspawn (keep in mind the latter will make you lose your spawnargs and you'll need to re-enter them after making it an entity again).