Posts by Bunglo

  • Your advice . . .

    I can't tell which one is your high poly model and which one is the low.

    I'm not familiar with Maya nor Xnormal, so I'll give you some general tips for a piece like this. First, try and make the high poly mesh do as much work as it can. If you can get away with having a single face look as though there's a beveled dip in it (such as with the lip of the vase), just use a single face in the low poly. It looks like you've modeled out the lip in it's entirety which isn't necessary, a proper bake of the highpoly will yield the same results with less tris.

    Smoothing the lowpoly correctly before you bake is super important. You don't want any unnecessary gradients or artifacts as those will show up in the normal map when you bake. Where there is a "hard edge" in your smoothing (this is assuming correct smoothing setup), break that UV island on that hard edge and separate the two by a few pixels. This will remove any weird black seems that you would get if you kept the island as one piece. Packing your UVs too tight is a bad thing. You need to account for mipping when you're unwrapping a mesh so that when you zoom out from the model, UV islands don't start bleeding into one another. The resolution you're baking at will determine (for the most part) how far away you want each island to be from one another. The idea is that you want the padding from the bake to fill up the gutters (empty space between UV islands). So if you bake at 2048 with a padding of 8 pixels, have your islands 16 pixels apart is a good amount to ensure the padding from each island meets in the middle of the gutter.

    Take a look at these links for more info:

    http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=80947

    http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?highlight=%28\bCategoryTexturing\b%29#Baking

    If you make that large cut of the vase thicker (as in, pull the inner faces toward the center of the mesh), it'll be easier to bake and will read better in game. Also, that weird, extruded chunk on the right of the vase makes no sense.

  • Help needed - Crysis sandbox draw distance

    There's actually more

    I'm not entirely sure what the problem your having is, can it be illustrated through screen grabs?

    I took some shots of my own showing how to place props as brushes. There's really nothing more to it, as Corwin stated, select the Brush tab in the Rollup Bar, find the prop you want, hold left click and drag it in the viewport. Make sure you have the 'Follow Terrain' button ticked on so the prop is placed on the terrain. (Sorry for the large size)

    [Blocked Image: http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/6164/alignterrain.jpg]

    *Enable this button if you want your props to automatically align to the terrain.

    [Blocked Image: http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/5069/placement01.jpg]

    *In the Rollup Bar, select the Brush tab, browse to desired prop.

    [Blocked Image: http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/1489/placement02.jpg]

    *Select the prop you wish to place in your map, with the left click held, drag the prop from the menu to your map. You will see a small cube with the props name where your cursor is.

    [Blocked Image: http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/1456/placement03.jpg]

    *Release the left mouse button, your prop is now on the map. Use the transform tools to move/rotate/scale as desired. Tweak any of the props settings within the brush parameter window in the Rollup bar.

    Most props that utilize simple physics, such as a fence, have already been setup to break apart and react as a Brush. Other props that you want to have physics, such as oil barrels will need to be placed in the same fashion above but as Geom Entities. There's a nifty tool that allows you to convert between these two types so you don't have to replace your meshes. On the main toolbar, click 'Modify' > 'Convert' > Choose what you want.

  • Portal 2

    Quote from Izuno

    Portal 2 of course gets a bit of the

    going which I think is very effective.

    I was getting more of an

    Quote

    Venture Bros type vibe

    from those areas, which I thought was totally awesome.

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    Quote from Froyok

    Yeah, not very fun. I must close hammer before (or after) launching the game because my viewport become black. Only a restart of hammer work to get my viewport back.

    Before you launch the game to test your map, minimize hammer. I had the same problems with the regular source SDK and that's the only thing that's worked aside from restarting the editor.

    Quote

    If you launch the game first, and then launch Hammer, that won't happen, and you will also have access to steam community (-hijack disables steam community it seems)

    I'll have to try that as well, thanks Happy!

  • Help needed - Crysis sandbox draw distance

    Did you get the terrain textures by exporting a library from one of the maps? Make sure the detail layer is set to the correct material, possibly regenerate your textures > export to engine > save > restart the editor, check if the detail layer is still correct. Un-checking "Mask by Layer Altitude and Slope might be the problem as well, though that's usually more obvious as the layer is either painted onto the terrain or it isn't when that's checked.

  • Help needed - Crysis sandbox draw distance

    There's not much you can do about the bad blending between some of the materials. That is, it's not really an error per se but rather, the textures themselves. Trust me though, once you add decals around the area, foliage, rocks, and everything else, you wont be able to see them.

    You second shot might be resolved by upping the hardness of your brush and painting away the lighter areas. This could also be because you haven't regenerated your terrain textures. SB2 is super finicky when it comes to the terrain textures and at times, when you start painting, everything can looked borked. So alway make sure to regenerate your terrain textures if you want to see what they actually look like. You may need to re-generate, export to engine, save and restart the editor in order for the changes to take effect. Annoying, yes, hopefully SB3 wont have similar issues.

  • Help needed - Crysis sandbox draw distance

    @ Vilham,

    Here's the official documentation in case you're unaware of it. Very good for getting familiar with SB2:

    http://doc.crymod.com/

    And obviously the Crymod wiki is another great resource.

    @Paul,

    This is indeed strange. If you look at the island level in the editor, the hill trees have sprites enabled with their 'ViewDistRatio' at '1' and the 'MaxViewDistRatio' at '2'. Those settings allow you to see them from a pretty large distance and you really shouldn't need to tweak anything else. What's the 'Config Spec' set to? Turning it to 'Very High' may solve the problem, though judging by the screens it looks like it's already at that setting.

  • Help needed - Crysis sandbox draw distance

    If you bought Crysis, the editor install file is either on the DVD or in one of the bin files once the game is installed. It's been awhile so I can't recall it's location for sure. The editor for Warhead (or Wars to be more precise) can be found in the SDK:

    http://www.fileplanet.com/197537/190000 ... s-Mod-SDK-

    You don't need Warhead to use the editor, just the multiplayer portion 'Wars'. Before I bought Warhead, I had to download the free Wars trial (it's the complete game) and update it to the latest patch, then install the SDK. This was awhile ago as well, so I can't remember where I downloaded it from but here's a site you might want to try:

    http://computergames.ro/en/games/viewit ... loads.html

    I recommend going with the Wars editor as it's much more stable than the Crysis editor.