WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

Well.. Doesn't really qualify as a level, but I thought I'd post it here anyway

Very WIP, lots of texture work to be done AND adding a lot of little geometry pieces and I'm gonna figure out a good way to have some smaller pebbles and stuff without it looking too weird with the sand dunes. Also got some ideas for the sky with a big moon or planet in there. But only if I can get it to look right... My tests so far has been a bit meh because I don't wanna use a huge sky texture for just that reason... Can probably blend in something though

This is some sort of surface research facility where they collect data from the planet's surface and running some tests on the atmosphere etc.

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Looks real nice Philip I love the terrain texture, is that all hand-painted? The windmills are also a really nice idea. They make the whole structure feel pretty functional. Small crit: it doesn't really feel like the structure belongs in the environment imo. Perhaps because there's no sand built up on the structure?

damn you're right.. I should have the sand kinda crawl up around the building more. Totally slipped my mind Good crit. I think It will look less out of place when I've come a bit further with the textures as well hopefully.

Yeah the sand is hand painted, very simple.

Not sure if you intend it to look 'lived in' but some footprints around it's base may be neat also. It is very cool though, I love the shapes in the building, very believable.

Good point too, I did think a bit about that actually.. Might be able to add something like that as normal mapped decals.. But I'm not sure it would work that well. Also I'm not sure if the engine supports that yet

I did however change the sand now so it's more scooped up at one side of the building going down on the other. Images are updated too btw.

nice man, nice, but my critic - these sand textures look more like sand-rock rather than pure sand, or is that what you are aiming for ?

Great sand, and overall nice models. If I may notice something - satelite dish and its arm needs some basement. Right now it goes straight from the ground, and I can't find a way to belive sand itself could keep such huge object.

Is that really a windmill? If so, fans should be much larger, right now it looks like ventilation fans more, and that would be... probably weird in the middle of the desert .

good question.. I'm not sure myself yet hah, I like to have sand dunes, but I still wanna have quite a lot of rocks in there... Maybe something like this, but with less rocks tho:

http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wp ... 90x742.jpg

I'll see how I can solve that. Right now it's just a texture tiling on a pretty big scale with a detail map, so I'm not sure it could handle too much of that type of rocks and stuff in the texture.. Maybe something.

And the "windmill" is more jet engine thingies, not really supposed to be that big. But the foundation of the dish, absolutely. make a lot of sense, I'll make something for that, thanks !

litle test:

Old version:

PhilipK : I LOVE your sand !

Yea sand looks great! Footprints etc would be cool though as someone said.

what engine is that philip? Sand is displacement or brush? Coz it looks awesome, the only crit is you can just about see the seam at the bottom of the slope and between where the angles change.

Working some on my never ending project, Putrefactory for Q3. Any suggestions for things to add/tweak?

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The repeated vertical (wood?) texture in the ceiling doesn't make much sense/look very good.

Quote from Vilham

what engine is that philip? Sand is displacement or brush? Coz it looks awesome, the only crit is you can just about see the seam at the bottom of the slope and between where the angles change.

Thanks! It's made with the BitSquid tech. I see what you mean, it's actually a couple of stupid "help lines" in the diffuse... Forgot to remove those. Should be all smooth down to the middle part. I just painted a heightmap in PS using 16bit color depth (important). Then made a normal map and diffuse from that, I made a ground plane where I scewed and kind of randomly rotated the uv a bit to get rid of as much repetition as possible, I then displaced it on a very tessalted terrain and then optimized that mesh down to about 5000 tris for about a 100x100m big area, that you see ingame. There's a big backdrop/vista model there as well using the same technique landing on about 5k tris too, but this one is something like 1.5km instead. The ground and vista doesn't blend now tho... But the techniques could be a applied to a way bigger scale as a seamless vast desert that looks sharp both closeup and still has big dunes from afar, but for that you'd probably want 2 layers of base texture (one tiling over very large areas and one more closely like this).

Kaz: I'd dim those white lights a bit and giving them a very faint yellowish/orange tint to complement the teal lights you've got there. Right now I think they wash out the hallway a bit. But it is already a bit dark so you might wanna up the strength on the green lights a bit then.

fantastic phil, dripping with atmosphere

final

That is full of win -rt-!

i think d3 just came. but very well done!

yeah pretty cool. 1 minor crit is the lack of atmosphere because there's no music or obvious ambient noise in the outside areas. visually it feels busy but audio wise its sounds dead.