...But seriously, who uses a variety of textures anyway? (That was a joke, not criticism - it looks good for the most part.)
The textures look rather blurry - do you have them sized up a lot so they don't tile, or is it just the detail level you're running it at?
I wish my displacements looked that good.
New shots look really good in general. The exteriors of the buildings could still use work - make the roof overhang a bit maybe, and use textures for the walls that don't tile so badly vertically. For example, most of the wall textures are designed for walls 128 units high. For 256 unit walls, most textures have a cleaner version (i.e. without the concrete around the base that the bottom texture has). Its hard to explain, so here's a screenshot of what I mean:
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You want the version on the right.
Specific stuff: (NOTE: I'm only saying the bad stuff, because you don't need to fix the stuff that works already. There's a lot of good design in this map.)
The ground in this shot seems a bit gravelly to me - it's up to you, but I'd probably go with a slightly cleaner concrete texture considering that in general the scenery is in "good condition." Also, apply smoothing groups to those columns.
The concrete floor problem becomes very apparent here. The decal you used for the crosswalk has details that match up with a specific concrete texture - you should probably use the one that it matches so that the "grooves" in the paint make sense. Right now, they just look random.
The far wall in this shot has a different texture for the botom 128 units than the rest of the walls, for no apparent reason.
The light above the door appears white and the lights in the room up the stair are yellow, but the walls of the room are tinted blue-green. This looks a bit unrealistic.
The stain decal is coming up from the floor here. This seems a bit weird - I'd probably turn it 180 degrees and have it coming down from the ceiling. Overall the room seems good though.
I really like this room. See if there's a way to make the lighting more interesting though, even if it's just decreasing the intensity of the overhead lights and then making spotlights (remember to make them non-dynamic though in the flags since they won't be moving.)
I think the perfect symmetry of the pipes is a little weird, but if it makes sense within the layout of your map its fine. The ceiling texture tiles a bit too much in this room, but since you're using it throughout I don't think there's a good way around that.
This was the first shot where I noticed your wall problem (the thing I mentioned at the top of this post.) Props seem pretty well used here, but I think the brightness of the white lighting on the left side of the scene is a little weird - it's odd to see such intense lighting when just a few feet to the right there's bright sunlight. I'd probably just take the lights there out altogether.
This is a good shot. Since the dark concrete on the dam is so far away, you could easily get away with doubling its size though so it tiled less. If you have reference pics of a dam like this, good on you. However, looking at these pics it seems like the concrete is usually the same color/type throughout the construction. Also, the parts that stick out are usually thinner and don't extend above the dam so far. (This is when you'll wish you hadn't resized it... good luck editing it now.)
I just wanted to say the cliff looks a lot better in this picture than it did in the originals. Good work.
Are there flares on all your lights, or is that a natural thing that I've just never noticed?
I've kinda thrown myself into a high-res-ifying project involving the textures from NS (ns.wad and ns2.wad mostly). I haven't really done any texturing before (I did some VERY simple re-texturing for Deus Ex as well, but it was items instead of environment textures.) It's still nice because I don't have to be very creative to remake something.
The big obstacle here is that I can't do any 3D modeling, and I don't have a program to do so even if I could (which is a good part of why I can't.) Because of this, my normal maps are just Nvidia plug in affairs, and I haven't actually been successful in viewing these in Hammer (having problems with the .vtf/.vtm thing). For now just color layers, although I've done a normal map for the first of these.
So I'm looking for input on these. I'm struggling to get used to the idea that there shouldn't be much (any) lighting/shading "baked in" with the colors.
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(Here's the old one):
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Here's a vent. Having not really ever used normal maps before and not knowing much about them, this is the one that really needs help. Obviously some (all?) of the shading shouldn't be there.
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EDIT: I just realized that the first one needs some explanation. We kinda decided that it needed to be cleaned up for Source - it would have looked to repetitive with such distinct features (the big metal hinges etc.) That's why there's a complete lack of them. Keep in mind that in NS textures aren't tiled all that much because walls don't usually go very long before being broken by details or supports or models or something.
This is my first map. I already posted it on a different forum, but I think I need all the help I can get.
It's kinda chunky, because it started out being just a layout. In some places where the curved stuff is lit by spotlights, the separate faces are really obvious - you'll see in the screenshots. So I may need to redo the curved architecture to make it look better. The arches and curves have all been converted to func_detail... I hope.
The style is pretty different from most of what I've seen out there. On one of the test runs a guy commented that it looked like something from Unreal (he joined the game while I was walking around making sure things looked right). Which it probably does.
It's basically three levels, all connected by stairs that cut throughout the level. I can't do an overhead view of it very well because the top level covers up everything beneath it, and the roof of the bottom level (the floor of the middle) covers up everything above it. There aren't a whole lot of props - I didn't think it fit to have explosive barrels or radiators sitting around. The combine interfaces can be pulled off the walls and thrown around, as can the protective shield things on the main platform on the top level.
Also, where do you guys host your maps? At some point it might be fun to play this with some people.
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