KungFuSquirrel

A few absurdly nitpicky thoughts, as this is a neat scene already... As best as you can depending on the setup, I'd match the haze on both planets so they look like you're viewing them through the same atmosphere. Seeing one planet appear darker and more clear than the other gives the impression that they're within the atmosphere. Might not hurt to shrink the smaller one even further; you don't need to go to realistic scale (where it'd be just a tiny speck in the distance), but it might still help to make the sizes a bit more extreme. Maybe shift it more to the left, too? I'd also look at the rings. The ring itself is weird; it looks like an additive texture on a ring when it really should be taking light and shadow from the sun and planet, respectively.I'd consider tilting the rings to be non-axial, maybe closely mimicking the rock arch on the right. That also should give you the opportunity to get some light casting on them, then get the rings fading out as they fall in the planet's shadow on the right side. http://www.spacetoday.org/images/Saturn ... _07_04.jpg is good reference for the way that the rings interact with the planet lighting-wise. Also, I think you absolutely nailed the terrestrial elements at the bottom. But the birds could maybe be re-framed for better effect. Maybe lower to the rocks on the right, maybe flying toward the sun through the gap at the bottom? It's kind of an awkward clump right now and gets in the way of the planets a bit. I think your barn and barn texture is letting you down here. The main chunk of the scene is gorgeous, but you've got some really bumpy and rough normals plus not a lot of breakup to the shape. I think a smoother texture with a little more structure on the front could be a real winner. Still, great work; the scene has come a long way already

Went ahead and moved this to Work Release since you've wrapped it all up. Great work, too! I remember seeing your wip screenshots; it's cool to see the finished product. Good luck with the upcoming release!

PogoP, that's really coming together. There's not much in the scene, but just the silos, the road, and the meteors are a neat combination. My one critique on the meteors would be to line them all up on more similar trajectories... Generally speaking, you're going to see a somewhat unified vector. Look at this time lapse shot of the leonid meteors, where they're actually all originating from roughly the same point in space: If you want to get them on different angles for variety, I'd go with the more radial look like in this shot; it looks a little "off" when those three along the top/right appear to be coming from a different location.

Thanks for reminding me; I try to donate some stuff to the Omaha Children's Hospital in years I can since I spent some time there as a kid (just for surgery, nothing really bad, but still nice to "give back")

It's ok, it took me a bit to remember developing it Also, Zenimax is really building an impressive stable. Who could have seen that coming a year or two ago?

3dnj: I was never a fan of the Egypt set, but I really like what you've done with it here. Nice work! Falc: What terrain generator, if I may ask?

Awesome work, 3dnj! Congrats on the big co-win

Once the team is hired and integrated into the studio, it becomes a Valve product, even if the idea came from outside the company. TFC, TF2, Portal, and Alien Swarm would not and could not exist as they do now without the resources Valve provided. It's a team effort out there I enjoyed the round I played last night. It's not as high production value as Valve's other games, but it's also a smaller free effort. They could have easily sold this for $20 if they wanted. Even with the "lower" production values, the targeting is crazy slick, and the minimap with the recorded replay at the end of a match (and the ability to draw your plans on it!) is just fantastic. I'm looking forward to building some stuff in this. I kind of wish there were some more variety in the layouts, more choices in one route vs another, but I haven't played the whole campaign yet and there should be plenty of opportunity to explore that in custom layouts.

Curses! You replied before my second edit

I don't get the sense that it's random, but rather that you build custom tiles in Hammer, then use the tile editor to stitch them together. Check out this page: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki ... and_Themes Edit: Man, how awesome is it that you could just create packs of tiles and release those for people to build their own campaigns and stuff. I'm gonna love the hell out of this, I think. Edit 2: Hmm, looks like I mis-read that and it does do the generation in TileGen. Looks like you can tag your different links to help nudge things in the right direction. Neat.

Here's the editor they're including: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Swarm_TileGen Holy shit this is going to be awesome.

Sorry to resurrect this, but I had a request on Twitter for the .rad files we used... I don't know if I have all of them, but I found this set from Adam, ferret, and BadMofo. Will add this to the first post for anyone stumbling upon them. http://www.filefront.com/17048783/rad.rar

Ah, yeah, I was just going to guess that that might have been the problem. I think that's still toggled with the ~ key; maybe you bumped it by mistake. It's amazingly useful on meshes... but not so good on brushes

I hate you all.

I remember the first version of this you posted way back; this is a really impressive improvement. Seeing it in motion is fantastic; I love how much life is actually in the scene. Well done!

Also, Willits confirmed the PC version will ship with the editor. Awesome.

The important part he mentioned is Steam/Steamcloud integration... Which may mean a link to your PC Steam account, cross-platform play, cross-platform saves(?)... he talked about treating it more as a service... now there's three potentially linked platforms under the Steam banner. Interested to see what that actually means.

Seconding the warning from Mino, we don't care about your baggage from other sites, and bringing it here again won't go well. Keep it civil.

These galleries are really great. Matt (Lunaran) was just recommending them to me the other day. Makes me want to build cathedrals!

Haha, nothing wrong with that. I don't think you need to do too much with the brightness overall... One thing we all do have to keep in mind is we're also viewing it against a very light site background. Even on dimmer monitors it'll look better fullscreen, but just a little boost combined with a darker TV (like you already mentioned) should still be helpful. Prod me with the rallying, I'm working on a Q3 map with Lunaran right now but I've got a short level worth of ideas that might be a good fit. If schedules line up I'm still interested. Kaz: looking at your shots I somewhat disagree with CJ in that I love that it has a sort of classic/old school Q3 look to it. I'd be interested to see more shots, though, and it's a little tough to judge this one without being able to see the proper floor (though the ceilings do look pretty cool)

CJ: It read well on my monitors at work and at home, but people will probably still stab you for it. I think you'll probably want a slight boost overall, and maybe just a hair more intensity to the light coming in from the window. It looks great, though. What's the ETA for the full package? I've been floating around some ideas, but have another personal project to clear out first.

3dnj: Good start so far. The one thing that is bugging me is your use of the rock texture on the ground. I know what you're going for with that blending, but it ends up looking really off. That type of texture is the one you'd expect to see on more sharp geometry. I'd recommend changing up your texture use there. Mino: Looking better and better. Really interested to see how you're going to flesh this one out. I love the lighting in the first shot in particular.

Great thread, HP! Never underestimate simple image searching at flickr. Not all images are available in large sizes for download, but I've never been let down.

Valid concern, skdr, though I think I'll be able to keep up for a little while. Hopefully you guys will pick up the pace and I'll have to enlist a little help! Also, since people started posting their own twitter accounts, mine is: http://twitter.com/kungfusquirrel and I'll go ahead and sticky this for future reference. Thanks for the support, too! I wasn't expecting any stellar number of followers, but so far there's been more than I expected.

That isn't a console or platform specific issue, the proper tech to deal with it didn't exist until DX10: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Rendering