Map disables light maps, for all maps

[Trude]

So after trying to implement custom textures into my map, compiling and loading it (sealed and no errors) produces a map without any lighting. Furthermore, loading any other map after will disable their lighting. Restarting the game fixes the problem, but not my map in progress.
I was told elsewhere that textures need to be set the parameter 'Lightmappedgeneric', but didn't explain where to find this. Are my custom textures not configured this way and where would I do this?

[John]

your .vmt file should look something like

i.e. johnbest.vmf

"LightmappedGeneric"
{
   "$basetexture" "directory/johnbest"
}

where directory is the part after tf/download/materials/***

[Trude]

I tracked it down eventually. It wasn't the problem. The miracle of Alt + P lead me to a solid that had a texture that had: "face vectors parallel to face normal".
The solid was a banister cap from a spiral staircase prefab imported from CS. Retexturing the pseudo ball must have caused the problem since removing it fixes the error.
Increasing the lightmap scale cut my lighting cost by about 25%. Seemed that I had run over my allotment of lights, causing the lightmaps to freak out and not compile. What sort of light scale do you work with for large maps?

[John]

tbh i was going off your assumption of the error

also i use 32 for my maps, anything higher and it gets blocky

[Trude]

Yup, and that was my wrong assumption. Thanks for the advice.

[Zeq]

As a side note, whenever you get fullbright lighting on a map that shouldn't have it, you can fix it by typing mat_fullbright 0 in the console.

[Torii]

32 for testing, 20-24 for final compiles

[Balls]

With regard to lightmap scaling, you can vary the lightmap scale surface by surface depending on the level of detail you need. Large walls with even lighting could comfortably be set to 64-128 lightmap scale without losing any lighting quality. This way, you can free up resources to have a lower scale in more interesting areas.

I agree that 20-24 is a good setting for a final compile, but if a surface will look equally good with a larger scale you can slightly increase performance and reduce your map filesize (and compile time, if you care about that!).

Source: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Lighting_optimization