Need help recreating Source Engine lighting and atmosphere in Roblox

  1. What do you want to achieve? Get the source-like atmosphere
  2. What is the issue? colors & lighting are wayy off
    Map im using for testing

The map in GMOD

  1. What solutions have you thought of so far?
    Adjusting the material of the parts, making sure all the colors are set to 255,255,255

Ive got all the ambient set to 0,0,0 btw

(im aware the HUD is from goldsrc, the source hud is overdone and associated with the PNG chasing games)

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Copying the lighting settings from hammer got it close to the original 2005 thumbnail of gm_flatgrass but not of modern source (i was trying to get the skybox but got the lighting color by accident)

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You could try adding a Bloom effect and a Color Balance effect (was that what it was called?) and desaturate it slightly.
Love the GoldSRC UI, I don’t think I’ve ever really seen it used.
May I ask what the game is?

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Im working on getting the general source jankiness in roblox for fun, will release once I get vgui remade (may be the olive version to match the goldsrc hud)

an update: lighting is still messed up due to me missing normal maps for all the materials and the shadows being weird
somewhat fixed the color and lighting

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Damn, you beat me to it. Good luck!!
I was actually planning on working on a Source remake (still will since yours goes in its own direction slightly) but I am excited to see what comes of this.

There are some resources online like Crowbar that let you extract Source game resources, you could do that and find the textures manually.

Maybe set lighting to compatibility?

that made it worse in my testing
source lighting is also more similar to voxel color-wise (i got it mostly accurate for now just need help with shadows)

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From what I know shadows are pretty hard to customize past basic things, so I’m not fully sure how you could change them much past what you have

I just removed shadows, i found a baked lighting lib that found promising but cant get it to not crash when doing the entire map

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That’s odd, can you send the lib? I can try to see what might be happening

Source Engine also lacks specular highlights on brushes and many other things.
You could make a custom material with 100% Roughness to hide the highlights.

Turn your EnvironmentalSpecularScale and EnvironmentalDiffuseScale down to 0 to disable PBR completely, as the Source engine does not use PBR. Any reflectivity must be done by turning up the reflectiveness in the object’s property tab.

Set the Ambient to 0, 0, 0 and the OutdoorAmbient to something like a gray-ish, dark blue color. You will also need to replace the skybox with one from the source engine to get that source style lighting.

Use Future lighting technology and set the ShadowSoftness to 1 as the Source engine uses baked lighting which produces very soft shadows (shadows on dynamic objects have very sharp shadows, however. This really depends on what you prioritize more.) Set the sun brightness to 2 or 1.5 for mid sun brightness.

For local lights that cast shadows, you’re going to want to use SurfaceLights on a very small cube like 0.001, 0.001, 0.001 (the smaller the better because the smaller the surface area of that the light is coming from, the sharper shadows you’re gonna get.

Get rid of the Atmosphere instance in the lighting tab and use the old fog system in the Lighting properties tab as that is the exact same system that Source uses.

I’m not too fond about bloom values in Source but I think setting the bloom values this this would work best.

Intensity: 1
Size: 56
Threshold: 1.5

Source also uses an HDR lighting system (adaptive lighting) to brighten to dark areas. I’m certain someone has made a script to do this so you may need to dig around to find it.

That’s all I can think of right now. Try these values and let me know how they work and what looks off.

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heres some screenshots i took using roughly the same lighting + color correction





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