Congratulations to everyone who successfully submitted their baby to the contest!
I want to use the judging 'vacation' for an update about radar creation.
Originally I wanted to use radgen, but since all the geometry is already right there in blender, I wanted to give it a shot.
I started off by aligning a big orthogonal camera with the outer bounds of the map, + 10% for the margin.
Next I placed the cs_minimap_boundary entities where the camera bounds would be in Hammer. Blender coords * m=>hu (~39.37)
For the radar look I created a new 'Radar' scene and added a global material override.
Playing around by color ramping the depth buffer:
Of course this wouldnt be a useful radar since I need a way to cut into all the overhanging geometry like roofs, to be able to see the actual walkable area.
The far and near clip planes of the orthogonal camera help with that.
I decided on a custom background image, some sort of pretend-cartographic height map. (noise color output > into uv socket of voronoi)
Finally setting up the compositor.
I already had put different geometry like cars, terrain, bombzones into their own collections for export, this is a great help for compositing now.
I had to mark four objects as radar occluders aswell, as you can see in the mockup.
Those were corner cases where the view frustum wouldnt cull them correctly because they were floating above ground, or were only clip brushes... i.e.
Everytime I want to render my radar I switch to the Radar scene and hit F12.
The file will be output to the map folder, from there I need to update it via the material editor.
It surely isnt easier to setup than the magnificent Radgen, but Im a blender nut, so its closer to home for me.
Cheers!