PhilipK

Hey sure thing I'll share the palette I should add a few colors that aren't nDo-specific tho (grey blue channel). Also, I need to caution you that the values will appear a little different depending on the engine you use so a (near) perfect hard edge 90 degree bevel with this palette may produce some inaccuarcy as mine is tweaked for the bitsquid engine really currently (seems to work fine with UDK too and their lightmaps will fck that up anyhow so don't care too much ) A color wheel like in that vid is really cool too, I'd recommend a faceted one tho with common angles (90, 45, 22.5, 11.25 and so on) as you'll def want to easily find 90deg easily) used something like that a ton on graw 1 and 2

Ah sweet you solved it, yeh the shading of the HP is also important, thought the issue would be with the HP in this case tho . As for personal workflow, yes I don't really bake out stuff anymore, only in rare cases. Mostly stuff is broken down to fairly primitive shapes in the end and can easily be unwrapped to simple reusable UVs. Even when more unique shapes are necessary I mostly just save out the uv snapshot and nDo or hand paint the normalmap using a small normalmap palette where I got some common angles for 90deg, 45 and so on (hard edges that is). Even if you do hard edge something and its not exactly 90 or 45 degrees between the faces a lot of times it's close enough to where you can force your normals to be either manually. And yes, tricounts are rarely the bottleneck anymore (texture memory is still an issue a lot of times however). Which is exactly why I see even less use for HP in my workflow, I'm not going to add a shit ton of stuff in my models that will only be there in the HP but not the LP. And if the primary goal of the HP to LP is to add some nice bevels to your edges it's waaay faster to nDo that stuff IMO.

ok you definitely got something going on in the normal map there as koko pointed out. I would actually point all of those faces on the problem area straight up (x,y,z: 0,0,1) and rebake. that should mean this surface should read as completely flat in your lowpoly, not sure if that's what you've done now, or if they are pointing slightly off or in their corresponding face normal direction. If that doesn't work, you could try just having those as hard edges and split the UVs, but I wouldn't really recommend that either. BUT remember transferring anything from a highpoly to a lowpoly will always result in tiny inaccuracies no matter what you do really, it's just the nature of it. Some problems are actually easier to just fix by hand afterwards - or not bake at all... I've essentially completely removed the highpoly to lowpoly stage from my workflow nowadays. In this case it'd actually be easy to just color pick those areas and bucketfill/paint in a selection with the avg normal color.

Thanks, that's some great feedback really! Definitely spawns some more ideas in my head for how to clarify some of this stuff As for the orange, I think we'll need to iterate on color choices a bit, but I do think the orange specifically is getting pretty damn worn out (even if I do like the warmth of it). I do think the work to the background will help this a bit, as you'll see the range of this facility and that it kinda creates greenery around the "pumps" in anotherwise dead desert landscape. An idea we were talking about was to show that you're actually in one of these main "oxygen" spewer towers and you can see more ones in the distance just like the one you're in. If we manage to sell that it's just of course halfway there as it still remains to make some sense of the actual machinery, I think some effects together with some more relatable details on those will help as well.

Also thanks for the feedback on the bg, I'm just now working on making that a lot more interesting, will be a lot more vast and should convey the idea a bit better of this being some kind of facility creating life on an uninhabitable planet.

Hey I think it'll help some once we've come a bit further kinda making sense of some of these parts. I have some ideas on how to do that. I think it's a valid point the middle stuff feels a bit generic scifi right now so good catch

Woah didn't see this until now, well deserved!

looks awesome! great job

Damn, ppl do pretty many passes here. I prefer doing shorter, intense passes. Always done that. But it's only recently I got back to it after.. years of doing nothing It's pretty awesome to go before work though, definitely makes you feel less tired.

Same thing as others here. Just playing around most of the time. Sometimes it turns into something useful, most of the time it doesn't, but then I can take away what I shouldn't do next time at least

Photoshop > Filter > Texture > Texturizer + Lots of sharpen filter.

Rad!

Stuff is looking cool. An easy rule IMO when choosing the ambient light for an outdoor scene is to match the ambient color to the sky color (or pick a light color you like and then fix the sky to match that ) In your map the sky looks pretty desaturated bright blue more towards the green side than the purple at the horizon, don't know what it looks like straight up tho.

Don't know about favorite, there are a few good ones. Lately something that stood out to me is Vessel's soundtrack by Jon Hopkins - it's some of his stuff from various albums. I love his stuff and it actually took me some time to figure out they were all his tunes in there as they are dynamically built up while playing (which in itself feels great in the game). - one of my favorites used in the game. Here's the whole game playlist: And for those who don't know who this is you'd probably recognize this (the intro of this which is pretty famous and used... elsewhere), fkn awesome tune that you should hear: edit: damn, saw someone beat me to it But still worth spreading some more.

Hmm.. is it just me or does it look like all those screens have a light grey multiply-layer over them? :S Scenes generally look a bit more readable than Stalker-style stuff to me, which is good.

I'll get killed here now probably, but... As someone who really didn't like the first Bioshock, I tried to play through it several times but always just made it a couple of hours in before I was completely bored with it. I enjoyed looking at the environments but that's about it. Would there be any point for me to look into this game? I kinda want to for the art again, but I definitely don't wanna pay full price if I'll dislike playing it as much as the first one There's always the option to wait a while and pick it up when it's cheap, but I'm even doing that less and less with games if I'm just interested in looking at the art and don't enjoy a min of playing it, just don't cut it anymore I guess... Same with movies. With that said, it does look fantastic

Hah I remember seeing that back then! awesome

Very nice, looks believable. I would try to soften up some of those slopes going in and out of the warehouses and in the last two shots lighting feels a little even, but I do like you've kept it to as few light sources as you have. Good work!

Thanks guys! Marcem: That's definitely a good point. I'm thinking of curving that out in the middle, but I also want to fix the offices/labs on the side there, right now it's just a straight line, that'll change to something much less flat and varied. Way more stuff I want to do with it, will see how far I get tho Oh and it's in the BitSquid engine.

Had something I started before, it's early on and lacks a ton of stuff (as you can probably see ). It's an interior area of the same scene that I was working on before. I plan to create a kinda natural transition from the outside part to this more lab like section of it by using a tunnel system with different airlocks and stuff. (decals where quickly faked in here... will make something proper soon ) This room will have some labs on the left side and the main room contains some air generation (will add some huge fans attached to the elevator shafts) as well as some props and probably some kind of extension of the walkway to get out to the middle at a higher level, just playing around with it at this point really. Gonna get some more greenery in there too, perhaps some hanging plants that an extension area can lead to. Also want to add some smaller things like a watering system and some big displays or something.

Very nice style you have going there PenE! I like

That looks great in general, but I agree with FMP. If you'd tone down that fog and bloom quite a bit it'd feel a lot better probably. Right now it's easy to point it out as a separate element, if it was just subtle enough where you can't really tell it's there, but it makes a big difference if you remove it I think you've hit a good spot.

Just been trying some demos lately. Unfinished Swan - seemed like it could be something kind of interesting, but the demo didn't reveal a lot. in the demo you only do the same thing all the time. makes me wonder if that's the whole game... I'm afraid it'd get boring pretty fast even if it could be fun as an exploration game (if there's something more to it) Zombie Driver HD - same deal, could see myself enjoying it for a while but it seems like it'd get very repetitious fast. And it had horrible frame rate on the PS3. Almost to the point where it's unplayable... Also been playing some Chivalry. Great game and it gets really intense at times when you are playing on full servers. Feels like you can improve your skills a lot by just keep playing, good combos and small tricks to learn all the time. It looks really good most of the time too. Well worth the $12 I payed for sure. I really need to hook up my PC to the TV so I can start using Steam's Big Picture... Just need to get that really, really long hdmi cable and a wireless controller. Almost worth having a dedicated PC for that next to the TV. But then again I'd rather wait for the Steam console for that.

Grats vivi!!

Thx Dan and Vivi! Nice terrains there. It's really fun to play around some with world machine. Just got a personal license some months ago. Lots of cool custom scripts for it too.