Posts by The Horse Strangler

  • Counter-Strike Map-Making in Source 2: A Hypothetical Concept

    Quote from blackdog

    1 hour ago, blackdog said: I wanted to post but need to do some search, on a new photogrammetry app for drones. Came up one late night I was youtubing (yes you get the most original ads sometimes) and was a full 10-15 min video demoing a drone flight and subsequent assembly of the imagery, showing different flight paths give different results.

    I dunno, to me -a hobbyist- looking at this stuff makes me think that even for big teams this is a "waste of time". I mean, scanning areas take hours, and I can't imagine how long it takes to optimise all?

    It saves time for larger teams because generally you have a larger party of photographers/artists go out on location so you can make the most out of the trip. The greatest thing about photogrammetry of course is the natural ability to provide automatic lighting data (normal maps, gloss, etc) but because you get a lot of those micro details you generally skip the highpoly/sculpt phase on a lot of stuff. Looking at star wars battlefront, Endor is a really solid example because of how much variation and color you're able to pick out from the photos taken, stuff like this would have not only required a lot of sculpt time, but a lot of additional masks would have been authored to create tinting variation of moss and blending.

    I would generally say that not EVERYTHING should be sourced from photogrammetry, but it really helps in areas where natural weathering has occurred and layers upon layers of variation in color gradation and buildup as well. That's a ton of stuff you get for free that would suck up a ton of hours if you needed to do that on each individual asset by hand.

  • Counter-Strike Map-Making in Source 2: A Hypothetical Concept

    Photogrammetry is nice, but it's a very long and complicated process for a small team of artists to pull off, more specifically a team of 1/2 artists working on a csgo map. Photogrammetry reaps really nice benefits when working on larger scale projects where tons of art is needed (i.e save time on sculpting/highpoly because you don't need to do that anymore), but otherwise the process requires a lot of commitment and thus is generally not worth it at all.

    Not only do you need to have some decent camera gear, but physically capturing locations can prove very challenging both budget and time wise. Lighting generally needs to be at a very ideal range, typically overcast or low ambient. Committing to photogrammetry also creates the problem of... committing to photogrammetry. When you start setting the bar at that level of res and surface definition you can't just go and construct a bunch of stuff the old way. The contrast between the definition of assets becomes incredibly jarring. As an individual it's a lot of time consuming work to take GOOD photos ( you can't just snap a bunch of random photos in a 360 degree rotation and input that into the software without worry), then to move on and retopo/ reuv etc.

    Furthermore on a topic about Source 2, I honestly don't see csgo getting ported anytime soon. Realistically our current workflows wouldn't benefit much from other than the minor speedups modernizing some of the tools has provided. You're still dealing with vmt's (vmats), you will still need to compile lighting unless csgo moves to deferred rendering (unlikely), and for the most part producing art is more or less the same. Qc's are gone, and that's cool, but source 2 just isn't the day to night contrast that it really needs to be atm.

  • [CS:GO] Concert

    gg on release!

    I think you guys might have rushed this out a bit fast tho. Might need a little more time in the oven. Many areas feel empty and unfinished, thematically each area speaks for itself (callout wise), but I think you're missing out on a lot of little elements that can help push the map.

    Areas that I think need revisiting are:

    • sections where materials transition, there doesn't seem to be much breakup between many floors and walls/ceilings.
    • Lack of supports under the seating area really stood out to me, the roof while cool, looks awkward just chillin like that.
    • Lack of specularity on a lot of surfaces. Some areas that would clearly be polished wood are just entirely flat.
    • Lastly you might wanna turn down bloom a bit, I think it's blowing out your overall value range.

    Ultimately if I were to sum it up: I think the map really lacks small scale detail to help breakup a lot of your shapes. There's just a lot of large scale stuff that contributes to the map feeling really blocky. A lot of stuff seems to be brush based which would benefit greatly if modeled out for extra detail like chamfering, etc.

  • [CS:GO] SHIPPED

    I wouldn't worry about votes guys, valve doesn't really use them to filter. If a map is good they'll notice. Besides, they probably skip all the pages with aim maps anyways, so votes def don't matter in that regard.


    Onto the map, looks pretty killer dude, I remember seeing a dev version a few months ago, seeing it progress into this final version is pretty rad, tons of work went into it for sure. On the note about the Ocean I partially agree, mostly because I've been there and done that, achieving an ocean in source doesn't come with many options that are performance sensitive. I think applying some specularity to the ocean will help drive it's realism a long way tho, maybe try giving it a normal as well?

    As for the rest of the map there's a lot of really nice touches to both the atmosphere and narrative of the environment. I think the only thing I think is a concern in the art department is that you might want to try and push the fidelity a bit more on a lot of your custom assets. Almost everything seems to have a consistent envmap intensity (especially in the dark areas), applying phong to a bunch of stuff will really help give those assets some more life.

  • [CSGO] de_import (bomb/defuse) (final for reals this time)

    Made a new thread for this considering all the links/images were broken.

    Big shoutout to Wilts and Hordeau for helping out on all of the feedback and new changes.

    This is a major update to an old map of ours. We had a bunch of feedback sitting for a while but didn't have a lot of time to get to it till now. Huge layout changes have been made, along with art. You can read the FULL CHANGELOG HERE.


    Quote

    Quote A defusal map designed for competitive play.

    Play as terrorists attempting to sabotage a valuable shipment of government property, or as Counter-terrorists tasked with protecting the precious cargo.

    WORKSHOP LINK

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  • CS:GO phong on world surfaces

    Whatup pimps, lots of confusion in this thread, so I wanted to hop in and maybe clarify a few things on how phong works and what it actually does.

    First off, phong is a specular shading method that emulates specular highlights on a surface, essentially defining the roughness of the surface itself. Phong is one of many specular reflection methods, there are others out there like Blinn/Cook–Torrance/Beckmann etc. Source already has a vmt setting called specular though, so that makes it super confusing. Phong wasn't added into the source engine until somewhere around 06/07 I believe, and valve never felt the need to change it (physically based wasn't even a thing at all back then.). In the current gen it's very important to not confuse specular with environment mapping. Environment mapping are the familiar cubemaps we sprinkle thruout our maps, whereas the various specular and envmap settings define the contrast, intensity and color of that cubemap reflection.

    Phong is a real-time intinterpolation of a surface's normal and a light vector (which direction the light is pointing). These two combined create a specular reflection. That being said this is why only the cascadded sun ent works for phong right now. it's a realtime light shadowmap that has readable realtime vectors. Apparently these vectors are exposed to models as well, it would be nice to see point and spotlights effecting brush surfaces, but I doubt it.


    Here's a explanation of how the phong settings work:

    Code
    $phong 1 // Enables Phong
$phongexponent 40 //Controls the size of the specular highlight. Smoother surfaces should use higher values (glass/marble/ceramic) while rough surfaces should use lower values (dirt/wood/cardboard) 
$phongMaskContrastBrightness "[0 5]" //This is specific to the valve implementation of the shader. This takes the existing phong map and powers it, higher values cause whitespots to become much more intense, while causing darker areas of the mask to get even darker. (think of like multiplying layers ontop one another in photoshop)
$phongAmount "[4.1 4.2 4.0 1.0]"  //This is a weird one, but I assume it controls the specular intensity on each vectore, being xyz. The 4th float must be the alpha of all of those channels combined, and thus should act as a overall intensity slider. Tuning these values could allow you to create some really interesting Fresnel on various surfaces (specular sheen on finely woven clothes and satin)
$phongfresnelranges "[0.02 0.02 0.02]"  // This is the actual fresnel ranges, except it's not really designed for accurate specular representation. Besides, brush work won't even be as complicated as model geometry (tons of dips and convexities) so I would advise keeping this at default. It generally ends up creating a rimlight like effect via specular, which is not ideal for csgo's realistic style
$phongBoost "30"  // Straight up multiplies phong

    I've added these as comments so it should be safe to drop that template up there and paste it into a vmt without it spitting out an error. Anyways I hope that clears some of it up. A quick note on some surfaces, Metals should generally have a medium sized exponent with the envmapsaturation set to 0.5 to create a tinted specular reflection that's somewhat dark and lacks color. Rough surfaces like wood and concrete should probably use a lower phong exp value (maybe 15?). Obviously none of this is tied to any physically based system, but it is possible to achieve some of those results. Just keep playing with specular and evnmapping respectively.

  • [CS:GO] Re-release of de_import

    WHOA MORE CHANGES


    WORKSHOP LINK


    And some new images!


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    WORKSHOP LINK

  • de_havana

    I don't think reducing the timing on CT's getting to mid is ideal. With the current layout I think a major problem is the desirability to go B as Terrorist when mid is as biased as it is towards T side. Right now T's can take control of mid, and thus have a strong advantage in where they want to rotate.

  • [CS:GO] Re-release of de_import

    Hey guys we've published another major update to the map with the following changes:


    WORKSHOP LINK


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    WORKSHOP LINK