Posts by will2k

Quote from El Moroes

Taken this morning on my road to work

I'm getting "near-future, oppressive-regime, gloomy-atmosphere" vibes from this pic (ala City17)

Probably because of the low sun angle/exaggerated shadows and under-exposed foreground

Quote from Thrik

Just got back from a weekend away at a forest lodge with my family, which provided a lot of great photo opportunities. I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into sorting them out over Christmas as it's been ages since I've gotten to have a good play, but I did find a little time to Lightroom the shit out of this one tonight (click for the 4K monster):

I think I went a bit overboard with the grading (LOL BLORANGE) and something about the framing bothers me, so I'll be revisiting this one when I do the full batch. But I'll tell you what, editing photos on a 5K screen is god damned excellent. I can't wait until every monitor ever is like this. It's also weird because to edit photos how they look at 100% on a normal monitor you have to use 200%. It's going to take me a while to get used to the implications viewing images this way has on sharpening — I hope I didn't get it too wrong here.

I think a bit of non-destructive HDR processing should work good for this pic

It could enhance the details and contrast between the bright sun area (top) and relatively dimmer lower parts of the pic.

Worth a try

Got Shadow Warrior

Ronal the Barbarian

Good parody of animated hero movies

Quote from Spherix

How would I get rid of these lighting errors? Compile options used for light_exe: -ldr -final -textureshadows -StaticPropLighting -StaticPropPolys -game $gamedir $path$file

CSGO does not like ldr; compile with -hdr keeping all other vrad parameters.

Texturing and brushwork on official maps has always been more or less of a mess since the early days of CSS; If you check the CSS versions of dust/dust2 or italy, you would cringe and if you have OCD, you will fall off your chair . Recent maps in CSGO (cbble, overpass, mirage, train) are way better compared to earlier maps.

One way to deal with those corners is to ALT+right click to make sure textures are perfectly aligned then use smoothing groups with a lightmap scale of 8 to evenly spread the light around all faces.

It would also help if all textures on the corner have more or less the same attributes in the vmt (normal map, specular, tint..) otherwise you will get those differences especially after building the cubemaps.

Finally make sure that no func_detail is partially inserted inside another brush as this would also cause black-ish tints on parts of your brush nearest to the location where it goes inside the other brush.

Got Insurgency and Assassin's Creed IV black Flag.

Still have my eye on The vanishing of Ethan Carter and Wolfenstein the new order

I wrote an article on this specific issue over a year ago

Overcoming Creative Block in Level Design

Hope this helps

The DVD sat for almost a year on my desk collecting dust until I finally watched it

Chernobyl Diaries

Quote from ruarai

Except I think half the reason it looks so good is because it's so inefficient - there's only 3 actual brush blocks with the rest being displacements. That means I end up with a stupid amount of polygons but also means I can add a lot more noise and smoothing than is typical. The joint between the sewer ceiling and gutter thing is a good example of how natural it can look. Except this approach is dangerous and I would be scared to put this in a playable map, solely for this reason:

[Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/AjiJ5Kh.jpg]

Over 15000 tris at the moment. Could be optimised down for sure, but I don't think I'll go too far with this anyway.

There is no reason to worry much; it's fine as it is: displacements rendered in bulk are cheap for Source and won't tax your frame rate (and won't count towards your brush limit).

Just make sure that you seal behind them with square/rectangular nodraw world brushes and try to convert some displacements to power of 2 instead of 3 for large areas where fine sculpting is not a priority.

It will work fine as part of a playable map.

South Park Season 18 Ep 09 - #REHASH

This season is hilarious after a couple of lackluster seasons

Quote from El_Exodus

I just showed some pics of mine to a friend and thought: "Hey, y no share with the core, yo". Here you go. The pictures are pretty old.

Sunrise in my hometown

[Blocked Image: http://abload.de/img/img_6157-1cutgroessewk72.jpg]

I quite like the contrast and silhouetting in this shot keep it up.

Quote from Squad

²

Did you took those photos yourself?

Thanks

I relied mostly on Google photos as well as some medieval-themed websites/blogs for architectural/historical references.

Quote from SolarB

Thanks! I'm thinking of just adding a normal map with the rivets/lines and maybe a detail layer or better spec map for the roughness. Is it good practice to have the lines in the diffuse as well?

Texturing will be a bit painful cos silly me made the walls as one object so I'll have to split it into segments. Forgive my ignorance of modularity, haven't really made a map since Build engine where you could just raise bits of ground and give them textures

normal maps should do the trick but it wouldn't hurt to have the diffuse with stripes and rivets/bolts for the extra looks

"Build" engine for Duke 3D? holy smoke, haven't heard that name in ages . Very advanced engine for its time.

Quote from Spherix

I'm loving that (3d) skybox!

Hey thanks

I used a lot of reference photos of English castles and surrounding countryside and tried to simulate this look as much as possible in the 3D sky.

The background in the 3D sky is an actual shot of Irish countryside landscape

RCBOT2 waypoint file for dm_fortwick

If you want to play the map offline against bots or simply want to practice against bots before going online, this waypoint file will do the trick.

I created it specifically for RCBOT2, so you need to have this bot installed to be able to use this waypoint file.

RCBOT2 can be downloaded from http://rcbot.bots-united.com and works for several games/mods like TF2, DOD:S and HL2DM among others.

To install this waypoint file, simply extract and place the file dm_fortwick.rcw in C:Usersyour_usernamercbot2waypointshalf-life 2 deathmatchhl2mp

Enjoy and have fun

Great work

If I have to say something about the scene, I would say switch the wall/ceiling textures to something similar to the original concept scene.

the texture has lines and dots which help create a sense of scale, harmony and clear edges for a futuristic setup.

your texture makes walls look a bit flat and undelimited.

this is still WIP so changes are still ahead.

keep up the good work

Chronicle

I had no idea about the movie or the story. At first, I thought it was just another movie about a teenager getting abused by his alcoholic father and bullied at school.

then it suddenly turned into superhero movie territory albeit not your normal superhero type, more like the angry anti-social superhero.

nice movie for a rainy sunday afternoon with some popcorn

Building my movies library of the great Louis de Funès

recently got and watched 2 dvds:

Jo (1971)

La Zizanie (1978)

I took this shot today at sunset.

It's been raining for the past 3 days and today was no different but at around 5 pm, the sun suddenly emerged between the thick black clouds for a mere 3-4 minutes and it was just at sunset

I ran outside with the camera under the rain to grab a couple of shots before the sun goes back into oblivion for the next couple of days (rain and more rain)

here's one of the shots I took:

[Blocked Image: https://www.mediafire.com/convkey/dca6/h1h11mab75ar9hc7g.jpg]

Exposure time 1/100s, F-stop f/3.1, ISO-100, exposure bias 0 step

I took this shot last week on the night of October 8. It was a full moon following a lunar eclipse with some black thin clouds scattered around.

Exposure time 1/25, exposure bias 0 step, ISO-100 and a tripod

[Blocked Image: https://www.mediafire.com/convkey/af4d/ozsjhu30jne924p7g.jpg]

Quote from FMPONE

Really cool architecture Will, you're improving a lot. This is a solid step forward for you. I would say the buildings are a little flat still, why not dig more of those details into the brushwork, create actual depth instead of relying on overlays and decals to do so much work. Also I would try to be really cognizant of building things based on real world photography from now on, recreating things and trying to be accurate will help you avoid very flat sort of boring surfaces such as in the last photograph.

I like your use of trims, try to take it to the next level. Trims on the ground where the floor meets the walls, trims around details, those sorts of attention to detail will help you get to a more aesthetic place with your work. Really cool stuff for the most part, keep it up!

Hey Shawn, thanks for dropping by

As I mentioned in the description, the goal of this map was a nostalgia kick-back to old-school fully brush-based deathmatch maps. Sadly and as you know, Source will easily hit the brush max limit. Even with having around 2000 displacements to ease the brush count, the 8000 limit was fastly approaching; sacrifices had to be done.

Floor/wall/ceiling trims are there in major rooms of the castle but had to be removed from hallways and less prominent rooms.

When remaking this map for CSGO in the near future, most of the crazy arches and wall/ceiling decorations will be switched to props, which will give me enough room to implement more trims and varied-depths/less flat decorations as you mentioned

Reference photos are always used and I mentioned them in the first line of the description

Thanks again for your suggestions