Black_Stormy

Very nice environment. Loving the materials. That carpet looks awfully dirty though...

Hotkeys are the best, although Blender tends to have some badly mapped common hotkeys. I like to re-map certain ones so that I can maintain one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard. Also shift+r repeats your last action - efficiency ftw!

I love blender! Been using it to make models for source and unreal for ages now. I have a few tutorials on my youtube channel that may help: http://www.youtube.com/user/abrythenabry

Why is everyone being so protective about their layouts. A new mapper is going to take your awesome layout and make some horrid fullbright map or (more likely) will give up before the map ever sees the light of day. I mean, how many people here actually successfully released their first ever map? This dude is floundering in the dark and while the advice you guys are giving is good, there's no reason to worry about if they'll steal your idea. They hasn't even come back to this thread since their second post. I don't make maps for CS:GO so I don't have a layout to give, otherwise I would. For the OP, you should remake a map if you need something to base your design on. You'll most likely fail three or four times before you have learned enough to make a successful map so don't be afraid to hodge podge stuff together until you get a clue.

I was playing nuke the other night and is it just me or is the roof entrance from T spawn totally useless? It takes ages to get in there and then it's not even a shortcut. I think it would be a more attractive route if it dropped you on the rafters above A instead. Kyrptonight do you think you could test that in your remake?

The baked detail is really great in this but the textures need more colour variation. Especially the tan brown material. A lot of the materials covered in tan could be broken down to more appropriate materials, and provide detail hotspots on the model. Higher contrast and higher detail areas attract the eye so you can use that to hold the viewer at more intricate areas like the cannon barrel and the guns on top and on the side. Subtle variations in the color value of seperate items made from the same material helps to introduce some variation without breaking up the model too much. Also as a personal preference I don't like the general wash of noise on the texture. If you want to keep it noisy whie still being paint I suggest taking the noisy detail out of the normal map, or at least blurring that layer a little. Right now the paint looks like someone painted straight over rust, as it is rough and bumpy. Usually with painted freshly manufactured metal there will be a lot of detail in the dif and spec but the nor would be relatively clear. It's a good model so far but I wouldn't call the texture finished unless you need to move onto something else. Break up the tan material more, especially the guns and the barrel - they are only two materials right now.

Love it. Love seeing a map go all the way from pen on paper to blockout to detail to balance to getting included in the game. Top notch thread, top notch map. Glorious work.

Hey I've been making a map for our mod Double Action: Boogaloo. The mod is all about diving and jumping around and so has some special gameplay considerations. The environment needs to have plenty of room for acrobatics since players can do wallflips and stuff, and the world collision needs to be very simple to allow smooth movement. This map is a penthouse office suite at the top of a highrise building. You can fall out of the windows and have epic falling gun battles on the way to your grisly demise. Here's some pictures of the first area, criticism welcome.

This reminds me of the Chzo series by Yahtzee: http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/5days/ it's a quadrilogy. It's also a great game so if you can do as well as that you're onto a winner.

Looking nice so far, and an asian city market is a great place for some awesome details. Have you played Kane and Lynch 2? There are some awesome environments in there. Also check out neotokyo which may give you some more source engine-specific ideas. Looking forward to seeing this!

That's a good start, the brushwork looks fairly detailed and not too blocky. With the interior ceilings try to find a way to vary the height of the ceiling to introduce more BSP detail there. They look very plain and it's much harder to make a big blank brush look nice, as opposed to more intricate BSP. The map is symmetrical, which is a nice go-to for gameplay balance, but can be boring. You can use the same layout and make very different environments so the map isn't as samey.

That deadline is extremely tight considering you have people trying to learn a new tool while competing. A month and a bit is just not enough. Stretch it out to 3 or 4 months and you might have a better turn out.

The red walls on the barn are a bit too saturated for the art style I think - there's not much detail in the diffuse which, combined with the saturation, gives it a stylized look. Also the dirt texture you are using on the displacement looks scaled up too much, and is inappropriately pebbly. Try to get another, finer dirt texture in there and save the pebbly texture for detail spots like where the ground meets a wall or road.

I like what Steppenwolf said. If you get in the habit of procrastinating, procrastinating will become a habitual behaviour which you'll find harder and harder to break. If you're at burnout stage then you need to take time off. And I don't mean from mapping, I mean from the computer at large. Turn the thing off for a week and go do other stuff. Go sit in a park and enjoy nature a bit, cook something tasty, meet with friends or something. You'll likely find that by the end of the week you'll have at least an inkling of what you'd like to acheive next. For me I know I used to lose a lot of motivation when I showed my stuff to people. I could work on something happily in private but as soon as I showed it to someone I would get the gratification of feedback and lose the immediate desire to continue. I think this is because I am no longer doing it for me, I'm doing it for the feedback. I have managed to largely overcome that (and other stuff) purely by being aware of it. Maybe instead of focusing on getting motivated, try focusing on getting un-demotivated, if that makes sense. Or just learn something new. That always gets me going.