Posts by Hourences

  • Tab or not?

    Its nice to have but not essential if youre not a hardcore texture guy. Specially photo sourced textures dont really need a wacom.

    And youre better of buying a 80£ a6 wacom to start with and see how it goes. It might seem small but its more than good enough for your average use.

  • Get a degree or not ?

    I didnt even finish high school and I would never want to trade the last few years in the industry for school, I learned (and earned) a milion times more from just working than from going to a school. In four years time my resume is already a thousand time more powerful than any school paper could ever be.

    However, while school is not essential (if you are good and if you keep trying you WILL have a job, with or without a school) it is also not a bad thing. Unless you are seriously fed up with school Id stick to it and sit it out because you never know when it comes in handy. Certainly in the long term. That goes for when you want to immigrate to somewhere else or when you want another job in 10 years time.

    If you can go to school and give yourself more time to become the best.

  • 3d Studio vs Maya (for game development)

    Source isnt exactly user friendly either:)

    One thing you will never ever be able to check is the framerate, how well it holds up once in the engine.

    Can you really paint textures and decos on your terrain? With vertexcolor or similar technique.

    Does it preview materials well? Including their animations, normal maps, spec, translucency, distortion, whatever else you might have?

    Post fx like bloom?

    Does it preview particles?

    Max at least have an fps camera build in so thats something already. I believe Maya still doesnt has that but I might be wrong as I havent worked with the latest versions yet.

  • 3d Studio vs Maya (for game development)

    There was a topic about this some months ago. Ive made entire levels with Maya too and it really is not the way to go at all. Everything you do takes two to three times as long as it would take with a real editor and thats logical. Max and Maya were never ever ever made to make levels, they were made to make stand alone models and animations and so on. Both use orbiting cameras while levels need fps camera controls. Orbiting cameras are focussed on viewing single objects and not on moving through large spaces.

    There are a milion things that are very inefficient and very slow to do in 3D programs compared to 3D engines. For example advanced material creation, advanced lighting, previewing the lighting, terrain, special effects, inability to preview perfomance, inability to preview post fx and other settings, inability to quickly playtest your level without going through 30 unnatural export settings, and so on.

    Clear example: Ive made large outdoor terrains in Maya for a video game. I had to model every piece of the terrain, which takes days, and then I had to alpha paint the alpha layers for the texture blending on the terrain by hand without the possibility of previewing exactly what you paint, this took a week and more. Furthermore we also had to paint the grass decolayer on the terrain by hand in photoshop, again without a preview possibility, that also took days.

    I lost 2 weeks per terrain for something I can do in less than 1 day in UnrealEd! And I have a milion other examples like that.

    I rarely playtest my level at all simply because I can see everything in my editors viewport already, I can see how many miliseconds rendertime of the engine this or that light uses, I can see how well it runs, I can see all materials, all lighting and all (post) effects in place and so on. Go try to do that in Max or Maya!

    Max comes across as having a billion options and buttons while Maya looks more clean but is much more of a mess beneath its skin to my experience. I preffer the more in my face mess of Max.

  • 3d Studio vs Maya (for game development)

    Max, more powerful and more logical.

    Ive used Maya for over a year on a daily professional base and its good, but it just lacks a lot of features that Max does has poly modelling wise.

    And beware, Max nor Maya are not level editors, they may be good at modelling things but they can never ever replace a real level editor for things like lighting or entity/actor placements, sounds and so on.

  • frontlines warfare: best photoshoped "BULLSHOTS" e

    The outdoor area is pasted behind the corridor or am I wrong?

    Its funny how people photoshop things and then get discovered simply because they are so incredibly crappy at doing it. If youre going to photoshop something, do it right.

    Check this out, this was a photo from Reuters, the big news aggency, of Beirut when it was attacked last year. They wanted to make the attack more dramatic than it really. Say hello to the clone stamp.

    [Blocked Image: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/pictures/20060805BeirutPhotoshop.jpg]

    And then theyre suprised people can see its fake.

  • So...how do you go about getting a job.

    Well, since this industry in its current form only exists for about 7-10 years its kind of logical that theres no one of 40-50 around?

    So hard to say what will happen when there are plenty of 50 year olds in the industry but on the other hand, I dont see the movie industry having problems with 50 year olds and as far as Im concerned the movie industry is the thing that comes closest to what we are doing. Most important thing is what you do and how you do that, how good you are, and 50 year olds are suppose to be good at what they do after so many years so...I wouldnt fire such person..

    It is a very frustrating industry tho, way too much passion involved. Ive only been working for a few years in the industry but can already understand why you ever want to do something different.

    The games industry as a whole is also way too immature. If you ever want to grow up as an industry then working over should not be considered normal for example.

  • So...how do you go about getting a job.

    Actually it might appear to you as if LDS are a dime in a dozen because youre floating around in level design communities but widen your perspective, there are a milion times more 3d artists on this world than level designers. Think of all the noobs who want to be a 3d artist, all those people who make those awesome renders of ak47s for mods but also all the thousands of modellers who work in the film and marketing industries...Compared to that a level designer is as rare as a dinosaur.

    There are also a lot more 3d tuts than level design tutorials.

    That also goes for programmers, there are a gazillion programmers on this planet writing programs, being active in the open source community, writing stupid office apps for companies, writing gps/mobile phones/etc programs and so on. If you want to be unique you are going have to do more than just "program". Specialize, although keep some general skills on the back of your hand in case of...If you can program and gaming doesnt work out you can still easily find another job. If youre doing something too specialized that is obviously a lot harder.

    In 5 years time or so it will be harder to switch over to another engine, engines are going to become a lot more complex, similar to the complexity of Max or Maya, thus you may be able to learn the basics of another engine in a week but itll take you a year or more before you really have a good amount of knowledge and insight into the new platform youre working with..

    In general like what you do, keep on doing it, have a lot of patience and simply be good and special. Be the reason why you have to be hired and not one of the other 4000 guys applying. Have patience, you might not find work easily but if you keep at it long enough sooner or later it will always work out, one way or the other.

    I started by doing contract work from home modelling stupid little houses, really no brain work for little money. After that I got into touch with Epic though and then things get rolling and off you are.

    As sucky as it is, luck is often more important than what you do or can do.....

  • Seamfoam and shorelines?

    Quote from zaphod

    this is probably way old school by now but I remember in vampire we used a sine function to animate a seafoam texture on planes to slide up and down the sand.

    Farcry does just that I believe, only theyve automated the process.

    An extra border of planes on the shores with two or three foam planes moving in and out, scrolling over each other still works well and with todays advanced shaders you could easily make it all look more shiny and more dynamic than what it really is.

    One single foam texture moving up and down will look bad, youll need multiple, possibly also slightly growing in size the further they get.

  • Upcoming large Photo-quality texture set.

    One could get away with blurry textures if all the tex are blurry. Yours are not. Some of yours are pretty sharp, others are really blurry. If youre going to use the two next to each other its going to be really obvious.

    Try to be consistent in what you do. Stick to a style, use of color, use of sharpness, contrast, brightness and so on.

    The first texe looks useless to me since it has too much shadow and depth to be convincable as a texture, the leaves on it are also a serious issue, see my comment below. The third is really way too blurry. 5th too. 7th too. 3rd last is zoomed in too much. Rest are ok.

    I would also be very careful with junk on your textures. Your 6th last texture has leaves on the rocks, that can look strange in game + be rather limiting as the designer wont be able to scale the texture up like that nor use it in a situation without trees like somewhere deep inside a cavern.