What I'm Working On

    Quote from yww

    Sorry for my bad english,It seems that some people complain that the map might be too bright to be played for a long time,how will you solve the problem?

    I wanna know how many people is complaining? Personally I don't think there's anything too bright so far.

    Interested in how you've reduced the rotate times on season by 3 seconds, is it a closely guarded secret until the update is posted?

    If you've reduced the connector length on a fully detailed map I don't envy you at all...

    Quote from Vaya

    If you've reduced the connector length on a fully detailed map I don't envy you at all...

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    Why i am thinking to say that this already is is best looking map i have seen. Ofcourse every map has it's theme and maps like dust aren't meant to be "pretty" and stuff, but it's still appealing.

    But Santorini, damn, it looks as in real life, i would say. :D

    I saw that you decided to discontinue de_grace. Would you by any chance release a .vmf? I love the look and would like to look at it in more detail.

    How do you create your custom textures? I know most of your geometry is textured in stuff you create, so I'm wondering about your process. Do you use photos you've taken and tile them in Photoshop or do you procedurally generate them or create them from scratch or what? And what about the maps you use? Just albedo and normal? Really interested in your process since you create so many and they look so nice.

    My second (incredibly unpolished) tutorial is up on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7iRg6iMbq0


    Quote from sevin

    How do you create your custom textures? I know most of your geometry is textured in stuff you create, so I'm wondering about your process. Do you use photos you've taken and tile them in Photoshop or do you procedurally generate them or create them from scratch or what? And what about the maps you use? Just albedo and normal? Really interested in your process since you create so many and they look so nice.

    It took me a bit to learn, key is just to practice in photoshop and tweak until you get what you want in-game. Same principle applies for the normal maps. Source is just basically diffuse + normal so it's not too hard to tweak stuff.

    Quote from D3ads

    DAT CHAIR.

    IT'S PERFECT!

    Quote from FMPONE

    My second (incredibly unpolished) tutorial is up on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7iRg6iMbq0

    Hey, as promised on Twitter, I watched your tutorial live @FMPONE - but I was late with my questions and thoughts, so I thought I'd maybe write them down here.

    - First of all, I liked the idea of decoration walls. I would previously split my world brushes for multiple textures and thus unnecessarily increase my leaf and portal count. Making a second wall for that instead is pretty clever! I guess you just have to be careful if you want to keep your room dimensions (moving the world brushes out a bit so as not make the actual room smaller)?

    - With func_brushes you showed us how to disable shadows and mentioned that you'd disable the fake ambient occlusion shadow (and keep the sharp normal shadow) because that makes your level look better. Can you elaborate a bit on that? Do you just dislike the ambient occlusion effect because the shadows look a bit noisy in Source? I've personally never done this and never thought that it looked bad with all shadows enabled. Is it something you just eyeball, when and if to do it for which brushes? Or is there a rule to it?

    - When it comes to your color theory and your examples, it seems that we were exclusively talking about texturing as opposed to lighting, right? I mean, on Season or Cache, the colors seemed to come more from the diffuse textures than from colored light sources? Is that correct? What about light color then? Do you keep them white? White-ish? Or do they reflect your ~3 color palette for texture colors as well somehow?

    Thanks for taking the time to livestream/record your tutorial!

    Quote from NihiL

    - When it comes to your color theory and your examples, it seems that we were exclusively talking about texturing as opposed to lighting, right? I mean, on Season or Cache, the colors seemed to come more from the diffuse textures than from colored light sources? Is that correct? What about light color then? Do you keep them white? White-ish? Or do they reflect your ~3 color palette for texture colors as well somehow?

    It was both about texturing and lighting. The spice color in this case is more in the textures but it can also be in the lighting with small but noticable lights.

    And the 2 primary colors are mostly due to lighting, the "blorange" thing is about mixing these 2 colors in your general environment lighting. For example using a blue color for your ambient (which defines light in shadows, kind of) and orange for your brightness (which defines the color of light coming from the sun). It's a classic, because the contrast between these 2 colors is nice and immediately creates something good looking. And you could find other examples of course.

    Cache is a great example :

    [Blocked Image: http://up.vakarm.net/plubo/news_interview_cache/2.jpg]

    You see, the shadows create a blue theme and sun lighting is more orange. And the contrast looks great immediately. Red and yellow are the 2 spice colors here i guess.

    Thanks, great post. It clears up some things for me. Sun light being orange-y is obviously a given and spice colors are clear as well. But can you control the blueness of the shadows? I've never tried this in Source, can you change the ambient (shadow) colors to be blue?

    yes of course. I decompiled de_cache to take this screenshot to show you (sry shawn)

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/PJFTAXV.png]

    This is the light_environment from cache. It's clearly orange and blue, that's what makes the sunlight orange and shadows blue. Try to find your own values, that fit the most to your needs.

    Quote from leplubodeslapin

    because the contrast between these 2 colors is nice and immediately creates something good looking. And you could find other examples of course.

    "blorange" is typical in the film industry from my understanding, but the key here i think is that they are "complimentary colours". it's colour theory:

    [Blocked Image: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/58/ba/5d/58ba5d39b7d533cfdc9a6fbedc89a0b4.gif]

    Alternatively, because of your setting, I would look to see what valve have used for colour values in Dust2. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more orange/blue, but a faint yellow-orange/blue-violet could be worth trying.

    Maybe make a small test map for quick complies

    Sweet thanks guys. I always messed with the ambient setting of my pointlights, not the light_environment, this makes sense. Cheers!

    Quote from leplubodeslapin

    It was both about texturing and lighting. The spice color in this case is more in the textures but it can also be in the lighting with small but noticable lights.

    And the 2 primary colors are mostly due to lighting, the "blorange" thing is about mixing these 2 colors in your general environment lighting. For example using a blue color for your ambient (which defines light in shadows, kind of) and orange for your brightness (which defines the color of light coming from the sun). It's a classic, because the contrast between these 2 colors is nice and immediately creates something good looking. And you could find other examples of course.

    Cache is a great example :

    [Blocked Image: http://up.vakarm.net/plubo/news_interview_cache/2.jpg]

    You see, the shadows create a blue theme and sun lighting is more orange. And the contrast looks great immediately. Red and yellow are the 2 spice colors here i guess.

    I this is a solid analysis/explanation.

    Quote from NihiL

    - First of all, I liked the idea of decoration walls. I would previously split my world brushes for multiple textures and thus unnecessarily increase my leaf and portal count. Making a second wall for that instead is pretty clever! I guess you just have to be careful if you want to keep your room dimensions (moving the world brushes out a bit so as not make the actual room smaller)?

    - With func_brushes you showed us how to disable shadows and mentioned that you'd disable the fake ambient occlusion shadow (and keep the sharp normal shadow) because that makes your level look better. Can you elaborate a bit on that? Do you just dislike the ambient occlusion effect because the shadows look a bit noisy in Source? I've personally never done this and never thought that it looked bad with all shadows enabled. Is it something you just eyeball, when and if to do it for which brushes? Or is there a rule to it?

    - When it comes to your color theory and your examples, it seems that we were exclusively talking about texturing as opposed to lighting, right? I mean, on Season or Cache, the colors seemed to come more from the diffuse textures than from colored light sources? Is that correct? What about light color then? Do you keep them white? White-ish? Or do they reflect your ~3 color palette for texture colors as well somehow?

    Thanks for taking the time to livestream/record your tutorial!

    -For sure, try to factor that into your decision making.

    -I was joking about faking ambient occlusion, but with good normal mapping you can accomplish a lot.

    Here's a cool GDC talk called the Ultimate Trim that goes over powerful normal map techniques http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022324/T…ring-Techniques

    -I was speaking about colors in general. As leplubo describes, it's more important what the overall color palette of you scene is than drawing a distinction between lighting/textures

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