Posts by PhilipK

  • Crysis 2

    Quote from Seldoon182

    Cam video hosted by Gametrailer and such... Don't make me believe that Crytek/EA can't contact the hosters to remove their own contents until the official release!

    This belong the marketing Crytek/EA want around Crysis 2 and that's pretty lame!

    I can from personal experience say that what a publisher and what a developer deem as good publicity, when it comes to screens and videos, is usually VERY different.

    And agreed with skdr on this btw

  • [UDK] - Viking Forest WIP

    Awesome! Agree with the tree twigs. Just varying those up a bit. Maybe have a twig version where there are some pine needles on, and a couple that branch out to some thinner twigs.

    Anyway I'm very eager to see more of this, got great potential.

  • Photo source is the only way to create good textures?

    It's always as people said up to what style you're going for AND what kind of tech you're using. And personally I use a mix of various things usually. Textures nowdays consist of different components that IMO should be looked at as just that: components that together creates a surface. I think a lot of people still see the colormap/diffuse map as the "actual texture" (of course some games may only use diffuse). And I see all I do as iterative processes and I never see anything I do as 100% done. Take it to a good level and go back IF you get time to polish some more.

    But to the point. I've heard this discussion a lot of times. There really is no cheating when it comes to creating games. If I am to create a bunch of photoreal textures and I paint everything by hand just for the sake of not "cheating" and it takes me one day to create one texture. If I instead used photos/a mix of photos and painting etc. perhaps I could be able to create 10 textures with the same or better suited quality I'd say I'd be a much more efficient artist then. So yes I'd say it's possible to not use photos and achieve the same quality granted you spend ages on it. If I was an employer and saw that I'd start thinking I'm loosing a lot of money

    Bottom line: The only thing that matters is the end result and the time it took you to get there. Not how you got there. And any employer who says otherwise I wouldn't want to work with.

  • 3D Max File Library

    I guess some kind of previewer. Well you can see a snapshot of the content in the .max file in Explorer if you use thumbnails. It takes a snapshot of the perspective window (or may be your current viewport) at the point of the save.

    But I guess that's not really sufficient for what you want.

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    Quote from robert.briscoe

    WHATEVER THOS R FAEK SCREENSHOTZ PHOTOSHOPPED DEY HAV NOTHIN DAVEL JUST FAKING BUT INSURCENCY IS BETTAR! ND PLANT!!!! http://%7boption%7dAhhh sorry I was having bad flashbacks there! Anyway good to see ND looking so very awesome and very much alive. Great Job Guys!

    Btw Bobby, worked any more on the caves part of DE? Looking forward to see some updates on that

  • 3ds Max problem on starting.

    Actually I didn't even know that there was a 'Design" version of Max till now.

    Tried to look it up and as I understood it's aimed more towards architects and such, some more suited lighting stuff and other tutorials. That's what I could find. No idea if there are any major differences to the basic stuff... Probably not.

  • Alan Wake

    Cool last video, I'm pretty eager to try it out

    Quote

    ":1kv50uqq]It looks alright tbh. Problem is that we've been watching the same level for years now. I'm sure this game will blow our minds not only graphically, but the plot will be awesome as well as the gameplay. It's a Remedy game!!!!

    Maybe not technically. But style, atmosphere and presentation > fancy tech any day. Of course both combines = win, not many do tho

  • 3ds Max problem on starting.

    These can be really annoying. But yes there is a chance there's something with your graphics card/drivers

    If you go to start > all programs > autodesk > Autodesk 3D Studio Max XXXX > Change Graphics Mode

    You could see if you're running it in DX10 or so. If you are you could try out DX9 instead. If that wouldn't work you could always see if it works in OpenGL.

    Hope that helps.

  • ctf_biomass

    Looks nice, the thing that kind of catch my attention tho is that the rocks are getting darker at the top and that makes the seam to the top texture very obvious. IMO it'd make more sense and look better to rotate that texture 180 degrees so the gradient goes from dark at the bottom to the same kind of bright redish at the top as the top/sand texture?

  • God of War III

    Finished it this weekend. Loved it. It looks absolutely fantastic most of the time and you got some really cool puzzles as well.

    Will get a hold of the collection with the first two asap! I only played the PSP version before (which is totally awesome as well tho)

  • The random model thread!

    Quote

    ":32vt0jtc]Depends on the object really, but yeah apart from very very rare occasions, I never use a single smoothing group for the WHOLE object.Bottom line is, try to have as least smoothing groups as possible. Cos the shading comes from the normal map (high poly) not from the low poly, that's why some people just apply SG1 and let the normal map do the shading work. But this rarely works tbh!

    [unless you're using object space normal mapping, but that's topic for another day]

    It's a very complex topic, and highly disused on polycount, but like I said, try and keep the smoothing groups count very very low, so you can define some hard edges where you need to, (Like 90º angles) and let the normal map do the shading at the same time.

    Also, chanfering 90º angle edges might work and it's preferable to chanfer an edge and have those 3 polys use a single smoothing group, than break that edge with two separate smoothing groups. Not only you'll get a ugly hard edge on the bake, but also you'll have a higher number of vertices. (Yes, many smoothing groups actually increase the vertex count)

    Agreed, it's always a balancing act when to use hard edges and when not. Personally I actually tend to separate this by thinking if the object is organic in any way or not.

  • The random model thread!

    It looks like there are some strange stuff going on with the smoothing on some faces.

    I assume you're using one smoothing group (or only soft edges (maya)) on the whole lowpoly? On stuff which is as hard edged as that building I'd instead use mostly hard edges in the lowpoly, only thing i wouldn't use that on is the satellite dish sides.

    The problem occurs when you have things with very harsh angles and use soft edges/one smoothing group and bake from a normalmap which looks accurate, the normalmap will try to counteract the soft smoothing in the lowpoly by render it convex or concave. I see loads of people work this way and schools even teaching this way. I don't agree at all with working in that way. In my opinion the lowpoly should have good shading if you were to remove the normalmap ingame. True, you will have to split the UV seams on all hard edges to avoid ugly normal seams, thus lose some texture space, still I'd easily trade a couple of pixels for nice shading any day

    Sorry for going on abit much with this... I'd like to see the lowpoly only tho and the uv-flat+highpoly separately.

    Oh, btw it looks like you're pretty close to the original, nice