Posts by Hourences

Actually, its not really released yet, and wont be for another two weeks, but since I dont think anyone here has UT1 installed and since the visuals are already finished its not exactly WIP either

I made a new level. DOM(ination) Horean and its for the original Unreal Tournament of 99. This level runs on an engine finalized in 98! Its pure BSP power and its pretty low poly but it does uses high res textures making it look sharper than the original UT.

I did absolutely 100 percent everything. Including all textures (HourPitores tex pack).

The level was made purely for oldskool fun.

The point was to show the power of vertical alignment in architecture and making something gothic, big, powerfull, impressive and mighty.

LINK WITH ALL PICS

http://www.gamedesign.be/Hourences/work ... horean.htm

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Great effect, dynamic stuff ftw.

Cant wait to see stuff like fire spreading through a building

Kismet is cool, this is how scripting should be done instead of weird LUA in frickin notepad

My three UE3 tutorials:

- http://help.hourences.com/tutorialsue3mated.htm

Basic introduction to the new material editor plus some of the most used materials as examples

- http://help.hourences.com/tutorialsue3mover.htm

How to make an elevator and a simple loopmover + kismet basics

- http://help.hourences.com/tutorialsue3lightmap.htm

How to prepare a mesh to be lightmapped in the engine.

Just finished roboblitz and also picked up swat 4 for 15 euro. both fun games especially for those few euros.

Currently modding the swat 4 to a brainless overpowered action game

channie : Likely around december 10-15 unless I encounter unexpected issues with something somewhere. I want to have it done for the holidays.

barrakid : Thanks a lot for the newspost. Ill mail you when the book is released.

Going to mail around to some non Unreal sites tonight and tomorow to hopefully get some extra non Unreal attention.

The books site is fully up and running btw for anyone who cares. I also added a whole bunch of new tutorials including tutorials on mesh rendering, zoning and occlusions (mainly in Unreal) and some of the first custom written UE3 tutorials. One on movers, one on the basics of the new material editor + examples and one on how to prepare a mesh to be lightmapped in the engine.

http://book.hourences.com

I just arranged new hosting for myself too which is suppose to carry my new tutorial site. It has a pretty Hourences'ish look so it might not be the best to host other peoples tutorials on since itll make your work look like mine.

We could technically team up with 3-4 people and make a Beyondunreal editor site, such site should be pretty easy to get arranged.

We could also just make a type of editor ring. We all keep our own sites but we try not to write tutorials the other one has and we link through to the other 3-4 sites all the time so you kinda suplement each other while staying independent.

A while ago I had already started several tuts including a moving meshes tutorial and a mat editor example tutorial.

Ah I don't even have to post it myself here

Next week when the site is up I'll announce it a second time. This first announcement was a Unreal community one only.

And it will obviously not be in dutch since I wouldn't get any sales like that

Written in English, proofreaded and corrected twice by other people.

Kleinluka and Kungfusquirrel did an interview for it btw.

nono, UT2004 ued is UED3. Notice the D. the D is important. Without D it becomes UE3 which is a whole other thing.

Another thing lots of people do wrong is describe it as the U3 engine. How can a game (unreal 3) that doesnt exist yet possibly have an engine?

Afaik, because it is indeed confusing, they simply dropped the editor version in UE3. Its just called "the editor" now, without a clear number in the name.

Ofcourse you dont get the commercial rights and also not the source code. Just like you dont get the Quake 4 source code either if you buy the game. You do get the game and the editor and you can mod the engine like that.

When UE4 comes out Im going to license it for a low budget game and then the next day sell the package for 10 dollar each as a "dev kit". Itll prolly be proffitable after a week already because so many people want to check out the new engine

Lee3dee perhaps, I got a friend who might also want to join in.

Where would you host it ?

People always seem to expect that budget games look as cool as tripple A games. They are budget games people, they are not suppose to blow everything away.

I think the editor deal is going to land them perhaps even tens of thousands of extra sales purely for the editor so that was a smart step to take of them.

Planning on releasing beginners tuts for it next week or so.

I rate per object or per level, not per hour. Rating per hour has some disadvantages but at the end its all about what you preffer.

If you work fast and efficient tho you can earn much more by having fixed prices for certain things.

And who the hell cares if you dont have a degree, its about the work you do.

The house will do from 10 to 50. It depends who has to buy it, are they rich, will they make a lot of money out of it, are they amateurs etc.

Forget Unreal and Half Life. Thats BSP lightmapping, were talking about mesh lightmapping like the next generation of Unreal will do. BSP lightmapping indeed has some issues.

I dont get what you mean with a "high scaled detail texture". DM gestalt and CTF Magma both use it. I never took a good look at gestalt but Magma has done it correctly (the castle). Tiling textures on a mesh with a uv2 lightmap overlay on top. Exactly like painkiller does it I think, or Killzone for example.

Its been two years since I last used Maya but it wasnt too hard to get uv2 going. I just forgot how

Dont got it installed either so cant help.

The amount of materials is reasonable. Dont look at it as a unique shader per object. The objects still use their own textures, the lightmap is just a seperate thing on top, rendered in another pass even sometimes, depends on the engine etc ofcourse tho.

Warbeast : there are two official UT2004 levels utilizing the same method. You can look and try it out in UT too if youre so curious about it.

The whole technique is not very new of special. Most console games are made like this. Killzone for example is made completely like this and imo it is complete and utter crap. This type of workflow is typically made by companies who happen to wrote their own engine but then cant be bothered to actually write decent tools for it as well.

I tried to make a UT2003 level with this technique long ago but gave up because of extreme iritations. I also worked more than a year professionally on a project (Shellshock, Killzone engine and company) using this workflow (model and place stuff in Maya, light it in Maya, render Lightmaps in Maya and export them) and its really not fun at all. In fact it was one of the reason why I quit the job. I didnt feel free at all because everything takes ages and a lot of frustration and lack of control.

You have zero preview ability. You have to push Render all the time and that is really really crappy if every render takes 5-10 minutes to show a low quality preview! Imagine how long it takes to do basic tweaks for the lighting.

It's also really slow to render out if you use decent render settings. At Shellshock we needed at least a day or more and several people just to get a level lightmapped. The Killzone lighting artist had four pcs om his desk just to render lightmaps. All four of them were left on during the nights rendering four different levels. Half the times two or more of those pcs their renders crashed when the guy came back in the next tomorow. The other times the lightmap appeared "not so pretty" and thus requiring tweaks, taking up at least another full night of rendering! Imagine how much time you need to update the lighting if you add a crate to a level after the render...

Oh and you might need to unwrap all meshes a second time for the UV2 lightmap, taking up yet another day or more of work..., altho you could also enforce a less pretty auto unwrap.

That is NOT workflow and userfriendly-ness

In theory the technique sounds awesome but once you work with it its very very iritating and slow. The engine should do this type of stuff automatically instead of forcing the artist to do extra work. Thats what tools are for.

In the game spellborn I am currently working on we can place meshes in the editor and then the editor automatically unwraps them and lightmaps all of them with a resolution the artist configured. This results in the same result yet 40 milion times faster. 5 minutes rebuild time vs a day in Max or Maya, albeit without radiosity.

Unreal engine 3 including gears of war and UT2007 will use the same method. The engine automatically lightmaps the meshes for you, instead of having you lightmap them for the engine, it also previews everything almost realtime and can render stuff lots faster=userfriendly yet powerfull and fast=the way to go

Large and instanced models (rocks, houses, corridor pieces) are typically lightmapped with unique LM'ed or indeed just vertex lighted for small models (plants, small rocks, detail, statues) to save memory.

Quote from Erratic

Looking very cool hourences but I'm wondering about this being for UT2007. Wouldn't there be a slew of problems that would come up with working on a map for a game/engine that's not available yet? Both technically and aesthetically? I'm sure you've got your angles covered, but I'm just curious

I got plenty of technical and aesthetical info/workarounds. Its being made completely in max and Im making all assets myself so I dont have to rely on any official asset nor worry about the consistency in tech, art or approach between my type of assets and theirs because there will only be mine.

Its also very easy to scale up or down since its all max modeled and the floorplan nowhere relies on specific jump heights or distances and large jumps will be supported by steam jumppads so that wont be an issue either.

Its also know that the game will be a blend between ut2004 movement and scale and ut1 so you can guess and estimate quite a lot, especially when you did extensive mapping for both games.

And it takes quite some time making everything so i better start now cause I might not have the time for it in 7 months time. At the start of a games life cycle custom content is also most popular so the sooner after release I can release something the more rewarding it will be.

Might start on a second map after this one, already got a second concept visualized.

Extreme wip, made in Max so obviously theres no light, shaders etc yet. Theres also no floor cause that has to be done with the engines terrain.

The yellow stuff of the house will be more subtle once it has been shader'ified

Rainy, gloomy fantasy like art noveau inspired nature canyon + house. DM Map. UT2007. Prob is the game only comes out in like half a year so while Im eager to go touch this up ingame it cant yet \o\

White thing next to the house is a waterfall. Theres a large tripple waterfall on the other side of the map. The house is build on a deep canyon, a river flows below it. The house is actually just nothing more than a visual landmark and a powerup spawn area. The actual game takes place in a bunch of rocky canyons surrounding the house area.

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Same for me. The rain doesnt do it for me. Perhaps if you made it more subtle, less rain.

The dark blue-er one is cool but I agree that more fire would be nice. More highlights, attention points.

A thing you could also do is put a car or other vehicle near the front and let its headlights or siren cast a light. Make it shine, be careful not to make it too dull.

Nice work

Im not fond of the rain tho, it looks a little fake and the white clouds on the right feel very "this was once white but I scaled down the brightness" like

It does look huge. Youre not making it easy on yourself..

Lighting could use less ambient and more contrast, its a bit washed out.

COngrats

Hopefully youll have a good time overthere.

Is this for ingame use or just for a pretty render?

I would personally also follow skdr's method. However if its a render you can use a lot more cuts, preventing you from having those arctifacts.

I would personally use splines to make the basic "cube" with a hole in, like sdkr has with the difference that I would let the cuts run along the lenght of the thing. Once bend the whole thing shouldnt give any probs because for every vertex theres a horziontale line if you get what I mean.

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