WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

[Guest]

Made some grass for my Day of Infamy map to try and take advantage of their new foliage system.

 

[Radu]

You've begun your voyage in a paper boat without a bottom.. you will fly to the moon in it.. Esther... Esther...

But, really, that grass looks amazing!

[braindeer]

I've always liked de_prodigy and thought it needed a CSGO comeback, the original didn't really work as a comp map but had some great setpieces.

I'm working on a re-imagining of prodigy into a 3 lane map. Its set aboard a decaying oil tanker in a ship breaking yard.

Its at the stage where I'd like to playtest it. I've worked in a mid which gives Ts the option to one way drop onto the site, for a large damage penalty.

If anyone's interested in collaborating for the CSGO competition I'm open to the idea, my rig is a real POS and cant handle more in depth mapping.

Edit: more photos http://imgur.com/a/vKXZG 

Edited September 7, 2017 by braindeer
link

[Guest]

23 hours ago, Bevster said:

Holy fuck. I want to make a comfy grass field myself now. Can we get a breakdown of how you achieved this?

Yeah, I should probably write a structured guide but I'm still a little confused on certain things so my method was probably really inefficient. That, and I'm still discovering alot of new things every time I work on it.

Here's what I did:

If you don't want to make your own vbsp (which you really don't need to), basically just find a map that uses the foliage system that you feel has decent sprite size. (Density doesn't matter, it is capped by the system. You're going to "fake" it by other means.) The console will say on map startup what material is being used etc. Just make a grid using their foliage material as a base in Photoshop or something similar. Doesn't need to be exact, you just want to know where the bounds are, and so you can troubleshoot if one piece of foliage is going to intrude into another or if it's floating on the ground etc.

Like this (just using of the base game's sprites as examples.)

 

After that it's pretty simple, you just get rid of the original foliage you used as a base and just start placing in your own within the grid you setup. Since the vbsp is using the same location for the original pieces, you won't need to edit it much (until you're troubleshooting your density later on). 

You'll need to likely clean up your scans before getting them in, which I'm still learning alot about. Once you've got it all ready, it's going to use whatever material/vbsp combo you use in your map properties like the old detail sprite system and basically cover any textures using the "grass" surface property. Using console commands, you can change the material in-game and re-generate foliage similar to how you would generate cubemaps. I used one of the commands to turn the wind on the grass way up for this gif  (type find foliage in console, you'll see everything you need.) Your foliage is saved to a .flg file associated with your map.

The real tricky part is troubleshooting your density. Because the density is capped right now, you need to find ways to "fake" density or to give your grass a more seamless look. It can look very "spammy" by default. I'm still experimenting alot with this, but what I've found is that sprite size is really the biggest help in this regard. You can increase this in your vbsp, my goal is to always hide as much of my bumpy displacement bits as I can. The downside to increasing your sprite size is that they can seem kinda blurry up close, but this can kinda be remedied with more fine tuning.

You can also try and match the color hex value of your ground texture to match your foliage in-game as much as possible so it feels more seamless.

The system is awesome, we bugged them about adding it for a long time. It's surprisingly efficient and the massive draw distances you can get with it are kinda silly (this was a 10k x 10k map). I love that the guys at NWI took the time to work on this, not many studios would do that. They really care about their mapping/modding community.

Sorry if that was a roundabout way of explaining it, I could probably explain it with more clarity once I learn more. Feel free to dm me on the mapcore discord if you want help 

Edited September 8, 2017 by nikkoship

[ics]

For the past 2 years, ive been making maps, especially halloween maps for Team Fortress 2. Both last year and previous before that, Valve included those halloween maps into the game as official levels. They can't count to 3 but i decided to do something for the players anyway.

Soon.

[Sjonsson]

Some shots of a HL2 level I'm making for a level design course at work.

Going for some Venezia feel. Considering modelling some gondolas.

[Radu]

@Sjonsson the textures aren't really helping with the venezian theme. The environment seems pretty cool though. I've always liked levels that used water as an obstacle.

[Sjonsson]

1 hour ago, Radu said:

@Sjonsson the textures aren't really helping with the venezian theme. The environment seems pretty cool though. I've always liked levels that used water as an obstacle.

You're correct about that for sure. I looked through the library and couldn't really find the Italian feel anywhere. So I have been looking more at other canal-filled places like Amsterdam. I mean City 17 is in Prague so I don't think it's possible to make it look authentic to Venezia.

Wait, that's Veniz right? All these langauges and changing names, in Swedish it's 'Venedig'. WHY would you rename someone else's city? 

I was a bit worried at first about using water as obstacles. But the combine force field/fences helps out a lot when it comes to closing off the canals without obstructing the vision forcefully with boats, physical barricades etc. But yeah I agree, water levels are cool! I especially love canals.

[Pampers]

use the content from the latest cs:go map?

[Radu]

Just borrow some textures from cs:go.

Edit* Damn, beat off by @Pampers

[Sjonsson]

1 hour ago, Pampers said:

use the content from the latest cs:go map?

Hmmm, good idea! Haven't thought of that. Wanted to keep it vanilla but maybe I could burrow a few  

[HoMaRt]

New scene in the progress. Inspired by last Nolan film : Dunkirk
All rendered inside Ue4 - All textures done in substance designer.

Edited September 8, 2017 by HoMaRt

[Thrik]

Takes me right back to when I visited Normandy (a completely different place but... you know). ?

[Hipshot]

On 9/8/2017 at 8:22 AM, ics said:

For the past 2 years, ive been making maps, especially halloween maps for Team Fortress 2. Both last year and previous before that, Valve included those halloween maps into the game as official levels. They can't count to 3 but i decided to do something for the players anyway.

Soon.

May I ask, is the treeline and the sky final?

[GrillusRetardus]

I've been working on a remake of de_tides for CSGO. (Mostly as practise)