Posts by shawnolson

Great Job Joris!

Quote from will2k

On ‎6‎/‎21‎/‎2017 at 7:24 AM, will2k said: Great work Joris

Shawn must be really proud of his "ambassador" right now

You are right Will

A couple newer videos on WW features:

Quote from Dillonbarba

22 hours ago, Dillonbarba said: I'm in!

gonna miss posting my updates though.

Dillon... if you don't make it in WW, I will seriously haunt you for eternity as a ghost. And not the Casper kind!

Added a new video today along with a significant revision of Hammered to the Max that details some of the recent additions in WW and updates several chapters. Also adds a couple new chapters in today's update.

Next video for this series:

Thanks for your kind words. I hope this and the following videos (when I get around to them) help make your adventures more fun.

One of the things that I've learned over the last several years is that Hammer users coming to 3ds Max struggle mightily with texturing objects. And unfortunately, 99% of the videos/tutorials for unwrapping and texturing are targeted at complex UV work generally for organic models. There isn't as much good info for new users to do the kind of texturing common with brushes (Planar UVs that flow seamlessly across objects and that generally use tiling textures). As such, I've got a set of videos lined up to feed a new set of information specifically for this kind of work.

Here is the first video for this. Enjoy.

Quote from baem123

1 hour ago, baem123 said: .. but my materials were not the same like in 3ds. only the basic diffuse color is added like you see in the picture. what did i do wrong and how can i solve this? i guess this is a dumb question - thanks in advance for any answer and thank you for wallworm!

No question is dumb

So the answer to this question is generally straightforward. You need to "Bake" the procedural Noise texture to a Bitmap. All procedural maps (Noise, Cellular, Substance, etc) must be baked into bitmaps. Depending on what you are doing, this can be either using the Render Map function in the Material Editor or it could be using the Render To Texture (RTT) utility. The render map will create a bitmap for a texture and the Render To Texture can take a complex set of textures and bake them to bitmaps according to the UV layout. For both, make sure to create TGA bitmaps.

The RTT will replace your material with a new material where Bitmaps are used instead of the procedural textures. If you use another method, you'll have to manually assign those bitmaps.

Hopefully this helps you understand some more.

Quote from catfood

55 minutes ago, catfood said: Wallworm is fucking awesome thank you so much

Thank you for the endorsement. Such opinions go a long way in helping keep me motivated to continue working on this project.

I should take time to make a better video than the one above. Although making displacements from a single epoly template is possible, you get better results by making a template that is actually a bunch of valid brushes (as each element). There is a tool in WW collection (ShellVex) that can convert the faces to brushes... but I didn't demonstrate it here.

MDL Plugin V1 released (as in video above). Included in both WW and WW Pro. Works in Max 2015-2017. Enjoy.

Teaser for the MDL Loader:

So this is a long time in coming. It's not finished, but those of you who own WW Pro and are using 3ds Max 2016 can now test the BETA of a new native MDL loader for 3ds Max. It will eventually be added to all versions of WW (pro and free), but at this moment it's only in WW Pro for 3ds Max 2016 (we will add 2015/2017 next). Among other things, it allows you to load MDL files from VPK (as well as VMT and VTF). Note that to try this, WW Pro users must install the BETA download in the store and not the standard download.

Please be aware that the MDL loader is a joint project of many people including Dave Brennan, Black Mesa and Wall Worm. Credits are in the link above.

Look forward to more updates, additions, fixes and videos on all this on WW forums.

Actually, there is another update today that is important. After more testing and reports, there were yet more bugs to fix related to the free version of WW. (I test almost exclusively in WW Pro these days, so wasn't aware of them all until they were reported to me.)

There were some bug reports this week that dealt with the VTA and SMD exporter: VTA exporter was broken is you used the free WW; the SMD exporter was breaking on spline objects. Both issues are now fixed in an update. See changelog for more info.

@Tyker No, I wasn't talking specifically about you at that point I know you went into that in the video some.

@Skybex Agreed about an editor that runs an engine is best for many reasons. That you can run engines in newer editors makes it unlikely that any serious new projects will start in Source. When your design tools more deeply immerse you into your world (which such newer editors do), the more you get to immediately bring your vision to life. When talking about Source specifically, there is no option (at least publicly) to do that--and Hammer is pretty much the least immersive editor there is. Using Max for Source brings Source level design a lot closer to an immersive workflow--despite not being able to make the jump into full immersion. The next game I work on will not likely be Source, and I probably won't be pushing Max so much then as a level editor; at the same time, I won't be using Hammer for any pet projects that are still in Source.

EDIT:

@laminutederire I hear you. That was never a focus for me early on as I was making WW to build new environments with new props. A lack of other needs in mind makes reusing existing assets clunky--pointing to a validation of this thread where the UI fails because it was not designed with a certain workflow/need in mind. That is actually changing in WW soon; Dave Brennan donated a code project that fellow Black Mesa developer Chetan Jaggi is helping me integrate into WW in the near future.

Quote from Tyker

On ‎8‎/‎5‎/‎2016 at 7:13 PM, Tyker said: Sorry! I already had to cut so much good stuff ... with those cuts, and talking super fast, I barely made it into 50 minutes. Please let me know what was erroneous though! I am not perfect, I do not know everything, and I'm always willing to learn.

I understood that time constraints limited the talk. And, again, I enjoyed the talk.

I wrote a very long response but deleted it. I think direct answers will best be served with actual video demonstrations rather than words, which I will try to get to when time opens. But the real gist of what I have to share with the Source LD community is that if you think Hammer is the best tool for A/B/C, there is a very good chance that your experience in Hammer itself has conditioned you to think that (in other words, you have picked up design strategies from the limitations of Hammer and let those limitations turn into "workflows" or "matters of importance").

The problem with Hammer (I'm talking of Source Hammer, not S2 Hammer) is that it spent ~20 years with almost zero innovation and stagnated the design strategies of the would-be level designers. So even if it has a few good things--it's general lack of innovation is a disservice to the design community that becomes "faithful" to it.

I cannot speak for the Creation Kit, but 3ds Max, UE4 and Unity have evolved with the design community. And any little aspect of Hammer you want, it's pretty much trivial for any team to add into Max any day of the week (3ds Max is just the ultimate design tool that you can morph into whatever you need it to do, and almost every Hammer function is included in Wall Worm). In fact, many of the tools for Source in 3ds Max result from me just saying to myself, "Wouldn't it be so much easier to..." The same cannot be said of the Hammer that most people are using. Of course, Dota's Hammer is a different story... but it wasn't a part of that discussion.

Please understand that none of this is critical of you and that most of the principles of your talk align with my own views. I'll possibly share specific cases about factual errors in a video at some point.

Very interesting video. There was a point early comparing Hammer to Unreal for number of clicks per brush that I wanted to insert because I've got some tools for Source in Max that just don't make it fair for clicks-per-brush... in fact he mentions at # 24:35 a tool that architects use that designs with splines called formz.... I've actually built a tool for Source in Max that does just that called CorVex (which I'm proud to say Autodesk featured on their app store for a couple years). I built CorVex because I personally think that the Hammer design philosophy for brushes is inefficient.

I'm curious why he left Max out of the Terrain discussion... as that is one topic specifically that Max has no limits. Likewise, placing assets -- as Max has giant set of options on this (think of the Forest Plugin). Instancing, also...

And for the texturing/UVs the information on Max was not exactly correct. He was correct in terms of Vanilla Max, but there are solutions for the issues.

I did enjoy the video, but as both an expert and advocate of Max level design, I was keen on those aspects that were erroneous or skipped.

But overall I agree with the speaker. While developing Wall Worm, I've had to update several functions and UI elements because my initial decision for action x/y/z was not good or immediately obvious for users. And this is an important aspect of design UI (which is not my personal forte). On the flip-side, one of the issues I've always had to deal with in terms of Wall Worm/Max is that most of the new users have always been having to accommodate have backgrounds in Hammer--which comes with it's own set of design-philosophy baggage. I know of many design strategies that are far faster in Max than you could ever do in Hammer... but so many people in the Source world have actually conformed themselves to Hammer that it makes it hard for them to think about level design differently. I suspect that UE4 will probably start changing that over the next few years, though.

In terms of my baby Max, Playtesting is really the only area that it fails to hold it's ground. But in terms of the Source Engine, playtesting a level made in Max is no different than playtesting a level made in Hammer. In both cases, it's hit the compile button, go make some coffee and find something else to do for the next 5-60 minutes.

@magmasloth Thank you for the kind remark. The contest this thread was all about totally bombed (this thread was early 2015). But there was another you can read about here.

@Dosentti Those darker strips on the top are likely due to the normal on those strips. The first solution to explore is adding an Edit Normals modifier to the prop and point all the normal of the top pieces straight up. There is a function in the WW Normal Tools to do this in a couple clicks. Then make sure the WWMT settings have the Explicit Normals setting turned on (which will use the smoothing groups + explicit normals).