WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    Quote from KungFuSquirrel

    Revisiting the "Eclipse Redux" idea...

    What i like most about your maps is how they melt all content together so well. You cant really decide what is modeled and what is brushed.

    Voodoo, your maps looks damn good too. The brushwork is just abit too rough i think.

    Very nice KFS, that shot is just super sweet mapping and attention to detail as usual from you. It is also good to see that you avoided the ugly ultra-sharp shadows D3 maps sometimes got.

    thanks guys

    Quote

    Yaaaay. That looks a lot better than what you first posted. I knew you could do better

    Indeed, I was looking at it yesterday and just like "...what the hell is this?" Still quite a lot of work to go, but it's getting there finally!

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    What i like most about your maps is how they melt all content together so well. You cant really decide what is modeled and what is brushed.

    A lot of that credit I think goes to the engine and content. Unified lighting really helps mask that difference provided the content also can bridge that gap, and I think the stock D3 content does that very well (way better than a lot of our Q4 content). Add to that the ability to build some crazy curved stuff straight out of the editor and you can really blur that line.

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    It is also good to see that you avoided the ugly ultra-sharp shadows D3 maps sometimes got.

    It all comes down to multiple light sources. If you just do one light, you're going to get an ugly black line. Get some fill lights and multi-directional sources and you're getting somewhere. The shadows are as sharp as they ever were, but once you get something filling in the blackness it's nowhere near as noticeable. Plus in cases where the shadow actually fades out as one light source gives way to another, it feels even less stenciled. I may even use a slight ambient light in the final version to nudge things up a hair more, but that can lead to nasty normal map artifacts so I like to avoid them if I can.

    While on the subject, also should be said that multiple light sources are also really key to pull off normal mapped geometry on textures. Seeing different parts of the texture highlight with different colors makes all the difference and helps them 'pop' into perceived 3d. It's especially impressive on a good normal map wrapped around a curve, where you lose that perspective that flattens them out when you get up close to a wall. I've seen a few good textures that almost look believably parallax-mapped set up that way. Pretty cool stuff.

    whee, yay rambling. Hopefully that's useful for someone, even though I'm sure many here are already getting pretty intimate with this stuff.

    Quote from RD

    looks great voodoo. I thought it was source (compliment)

    I actually did too; at first I thought some of our textures had found their way over there which was an odd thought... wasn't until I picked up on the hangar caustic shader (the blue orange bit) and the light textures that I caught on.

    What textures are those, by the way? Your own, or some custom set somewhere? They look really nice.

    Quote from KungFuSquirrel

    I actually did too; at first I thought some of our textures had found their way over there which was an odd thought... wasn't until I picked up on the hangar caustic shader (the blue orange bit) and the light textures that I caught on.

    What textures are those, by the way? Your own, or some custom set somewhere? They look really nice.

    big thx, yes the stone texture are selfmade i have them with different versions, some darker, lighter, with broken effects ect, i use them later when the layout is ready and the gameplay is finished

    Quote from MJ

    why d3 tho?

    well, it's the editor I use at work and thus am most familiar with, has the greatest amount of raw geometric control of any editor on the market, a kick-ass lighting system, and a great selection of clean-ish sci-fi textures and content.

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