User's Guide ‐ Updated Renderer

Source Level Editor 2.104

Overview

Source Level Editor (SLE) introduces a number of changes to the render modes, material rendering, and aims to improve user convenience in relation to these areas.

Flat View changes

In Hammer 4.1, the Flat View renders solids in arbitrary colours and renders models the same way the Textured View does; displacements are rendered in pure white, making it difficult to work with them.
In SLE, all three render differently: the solids are grey, models are mono-colour/tinted based on their tris count, and displacements render with a wireframe.

Flat View of Lost Coast in Hammer 4.1.

The same view in SLE.

The skybox is toggled by using the Preview Skybox toolbar button or using the default hotkey, Y. It is rendered in place of faces that have a material with %compilesky or %compile2Dsky parameters.
In turn, those faces become invisible and unselectable in 3D; however, if selected in 2D, or as part of a group or a visgroup, those faces/brushes will be visible.

More Preview Helpers

SLE adds several new visual helpers for accurately previewing entities: spotlights, ropes, and beams.

Previews of beams and spotlights.

Previews of textured ropes.

These helpers are somewhat experimental in 2.104, not fully emulating every aspect of in-game behavior. For example, beams don't simulate Noise and ropes don't preview Subdivision.

Hiding Tool Textures

SLE lets you effortlessly hide and unhide brushes covered with Tool Textures - triggers, areaportals, visclusters, clips, etc. As they tend to clutter the view and get in the way of selection, getting used to this function can go a long way toward making mapping easier and faster, without going into VisGroups to toggle Brush Entities and Tool Brushes (and more importantly, without affecting the compiled map in the process - they're only hidden in-editor).

The editor keeps a list of faces using textures from the tools\ folder, minus Nodraw, Black and Skybox; rendering these faces can be toggled with the toolbar button Show toolbrush faces or the assigned hotkey (default: T).

Hiding Editor Objects

The same way tool brushes can be clutter, so can editor objects - entity icons, lines, model helpers. They too can now be hidden with a single button, Show editor-only objects or hotkey (default: Shift+Y).

The full list considered 'editor-only' is as follows:

• All node entities (info_node and related);
• ai_*;
• ambient_*;
• assault_*;
• color_*;
• env_*;
• filter_*;
• game_*;
• info_*;
• ladder_*;
• light*;
• logic_*;
• math_*;
• path_*;
• phys_*;
• point_*;
• scripted_*;
• test_*;
• vgui_*;

Like tool brushes, these are only hidden in-editor, not affecting compilation.

Skybox Preview

See Skybox Preview.

Material Proxies

SLE supports all standard Material Proxies and previews them in realtime, for effects like scrolling textures, Sine, animated textures. There is no setting that controls it; it's always on.
One known bug affects Shaded Textured View: in it, proxies often affect the wrong materials (such as a scrolling-texture force field causing nearby metal walls to also scroll), and sometimes causes the UV to stretch. Currently the only solution is to switch away from Shaded Textured View.