Hint blackout - SOLVED

[RedSnappa]

What causes blackout inside or near hint brushes, and how do I eliminate it? These pictures are examples:

These areas are well-lit when viewed from other perspectives.

[johnnyenglish]

hint should only be used on a single face of a brush, the face you want to split 2 areas, use skip on other faces.

[RedSnappa]

I put common/nodraw on the other faces because common/skip causes any face of another brush in contact with it not to render, creating the "hall of mirrors" error.

[johnnyenglish]

All I can do without examining your map is point you to this

How to use hint

Read it and try the examples, it's worth also noting Hints can't really do anything for a giant box with no visibility blocking of any sorts.

[RedSnappa]

[JRandomNoob]

Are you sure you have the skip shader at all? When I first tried it, I ran into an odd problem — a large horizontal hint (à la Casa) caused the map to be pitch black. Turned out that even though I could select skip in the Radiant texture menu, the actual shader was missing, resulting in skip-covered faces being rendered as the “shader not found” texture, which killed off the skybox… Had to google the shader and add it manually to common.shader (the file I found had antiportal too, also missing in my cobbled-together installation):

[RedSnappa]

[johnnyenglish]

I usually use my own skip shader, change this to suit your mapname

textures/cmm_hollywood_a/skip
{
qer_editorimage textures/skip.tga
qer_nocarve
qer_trans 0.30
surfaceparm nodraw
surfaceparm nonsolid
surfaceparm structural
surfaceparm trans
surfaceparm noimpact
surfaceparm skip
}

[RedSnappa]

I found a common.shader file and added antiportal and skip to it. I'll see if it works.

[RedSnappa]

It looks like my hint and skip problems are solved. Thanks everyone.