Lightbridge gel not opaque to thermal discouragement beam?
So, I was testing out a puzzle idea in the PTI editor, involving catching gel on a hard light bridge to block a thermal discouragement beam from reaching a beam catcher. Turns out, gelled-up light bridges are just as transparent to TDB's as their ungelled counterparts, which means I need to go to the "real" level editor to have any hope of this being a working puzzle. So I was wondering how robustly this could be done in Hammer (i.e. would the bridge need to be at a fixed location, with an "on painted" trigger to activate something to block the beam? Or is there a way to customize the light bridge's texture to always have this property?). Also I wanted to get some feedback from anyone as to whether you think this is even a good idea for a puzzle, if it can be made to work.
I believe that lightbridges and painted lightbridges cannot stop lasers going through. But I do think that having laser-blocking lightbridges would call for some interesting puzzle concepts.
The only thing I could suggest for a beginner hammer user is to have an invisible brush which enables in the same spot as the lightbridge is when placed there.
You can use a func_portal_detector for determining where a player has placed their portal however you would probably need a whole heaps of portal detectors with a another whole heap of brushes which enable when you fire a portal there.
If you are to do this: have a limited amount of spaces where you can put the lightbridge or have it static so then you do not need so many entities.
The only way to properly do this would probably be done through scripting.
You could attach an env_entity_maker to a prop_paint_bomb from the dropper with a trigger, so that it would spawn a weighted cube with rendermode 10 and a script to set it to a flat model. OnPainted it would suicide, if the new gel were water it would be gone, if it were another blob it would be replaced. IIRC this is how they made gel in Portal 1.