Posts by KungFuSquirrel

echoing previous sentiment, using the current version of the picture I see...

Quick eyeball says you could lose 64 by getting rid of the bevel on the top of the bucket (not a place you'd really expect anything rounded; they'd just be cut off at that point), plus a few extra by adjusting the triangle divisions around those holes. The tops and sides each have a split that goes out to the middle of that side's edge... If you look at the bottom, you can see where it uses 3 triangles instead of 4 and avoids splitting the outer edge.

Rough guess is another 24 you could trim off there; that'd put you down just under 250 tris. Could also drop from 8 divisions between the two handle/hole bits to 6 without looking too blocky. Because it's already 'built' with flat objects (the bits of wood) I think you can really get away without having as much roundness.

If nothing else, those reductions could also give you some room to vary up the silhouette a bit - some planks are longer than others, a gap in between, etc. Which would add back a few tris here and there but make it look even more detailed than it is now.

you know, someone would be welcome to unsticky this now

Half-Life's tools haven't really improved, though... A lot of HL2 elements are still throwbacks to the way things were done back in the Quake 1 days (i.e. the HL code base) and not really the sort of thing those tools were ever designed to handle.

Even D3's toolset, for example, is anything but polished but it's still ridiculous what one person can do with the right knowledge, and very quickly at that. Throw that into a polished and easy to use toolset (like, say, Unreal - epic kicks ass at polished and functional tools ), and, well... Hotness.

It's a tradeoff, really. Patch alignment will be a little more annoying but if you know your sub-1 texture divisions really well it's not too hard to fit/shift around. And it's always plenty easy to go flat, lift texture alignment from an adjacent brush, and then bend.

The gain is that all of the trims will be in 1 batch per portal area. That's crazy awesome for how many textures he's apparently cramming in there, and is something that I'm sure we would have done all over had we had better and accurate performance information available more than a few months before we shipped.

Great work

I'm a little iffy on the top trip but it looks like a great normal that should pull off really well.

The trim on the bottom is really nice but it bothers me that it's so obviously narrow. I'd almost prefer uniform division with no rivets, or no doubled up rivets (like 1 rivet every 4 divisions or so). Your texture set and your call, of course, but it comes very close to being a spot on variation of one of the most useful textures in the entire game.

that pulls off really nicely.

just imagine the logo bumper at the start of every game! the headbobbing transitioning into the stencil style thing with a flash of light in the background and general rumbling...

Quote from Polaris

You didn't remove the cones yet

This is the same shot with the discussion from last night; of course they're still there.

yeah, I can tally my NS work to starting over 4 years ago... almost 4 1/2.

[Blocked Image: http://www.button-masher.net/images/wip/d3_eclipse_008.jpg]

Warmed up the tones a step further, swapped out more textures, started adding pipes & wires phase, some fun decals for detail (sadly the wear and tear decals in d3 are pretty limited)... floor is now an alpha so you can see the stuff I put under there. Though whether or not that'll translate into shots is yet to be seen...

well well, welcome to the activision family.

Well, if we're going the hypothetical route, my own dream personal startup company:

One Shot Studios.

No franchises, no sequels, no expansions. Come up with a cool game, have a blast making it, ship it, repeat.

almost 2 years, represent!

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.

Quote from Polaris

Even if that were the case, what would stop us from starting now?

why, honor, of course!!

Do we have to wait until May to start?

I think it's funny you call those 'lowest settings'

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.

What's that turret aiming lower right covering? Does anyone really come from that direction? It doesn't look like there'd ever be any reason to go down to that corner if it's covered by a turret and you can just get where you want to go sooner by going in from the top or top left.

If it were pointed toward the upper left instead, you might actually get some mileage out of that back area where there's incentive to move behind that MG position (if occupied) and hit from another angle.

Might just be me mis-reading the layout, but wanted to share that thought.

thanks guys

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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.