awp_natural [CS:GO]

[Serialmapper]

Here i present you my small/medium awp map. The actions takes place on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere. The layout is symmetrical. It features custom detail sprites by me .

Credis: @Yanzl for pines and ocean water

STEAM WORKSHOP

a picture is a thousand words but i guess a video clip is a thousand pictures

 

Edited May 31, 2021 by Serialmapper

[text_fish]

Looks nice. I'd like to play arms race on it.

[Serialmapper]

It has arms race but with bots you go in the enemy base and slaughter them as they spawn. What goes well on it is flying scoutsman (but with awp's). 

[Klems]

Very relaxing! Lovely skybox. Have some feedback:

- The skybox transition can be seen very clearly because of the texture mis-alignement. To fix that, add a sky_camera on the origin, then select it and your water brush, enable texture scale lock and texture lock, copy it and scale by 1/16. Then disable texture scale lock and re-scale your water brush as needed. This should fix any seams.

- I think the danger zone update added functionality to reflect stuff on skybox water right? That would be cool.

- The grass is super aliased, not sure why. I can definitely see this being a big problem in an awp map as it's quite distracting. Make sure mip-maps are built and enable $allowalphatocoverage, if possible. Same thing for trees. Maybe rework your colors/contrast as well.

- Some light pink/orange directionnal fog oriented toward the sun might look cool, not sure if that's already the case.

- Soundscapes could use more work.

- Some shells on the beach and a yacht in the skybox would be tight af.

Edited December 26, 2018 by Klems

[Serialmapper]

Regarding the  water texture from the skybox vs the alignment from the playable map, I observed that in the early stages and  I did twice the operation described by you , however that "mis-alignement"  appears after building the cubemaps and it is more visible from a height. To reduce that glitch i would have to enlarge more the map size to extend the water, or not to build cubemas at all. Unfortunately this is one of the limitations of the source engine. With this map i tried to do something relatively similar to what i did in cryengine. For the detail sprites i used large textures. A single plant was 512x512 pixels. The whole texture being 2048x2048 pixels, maybe that's why it looks super aliased. The danger zone update added from what i had seen only the ability to reflect the sun sprite, other that that in dz_blacksite the 3skybox is foggy, and the water texture is kinda blurry to mask that transition zone.

 

Edited December 26, 2018 by Serialmapper

[Squad]

19 hours ago, Serialmapper said:

Regarding the  water texture from the skybox vs the alignment from the playable map, I observed that in the early stages and  I did twice the operation described by you , however that "mis-alignement"  appears after building the cubemaps and it is more visible from a height. To reduce that glitch i would have to enlarge more the map size to extend the water, or not to build cubemas at all. Unfortunately this is one of the limitations of the source engine. With this map i tried to do something relatively similar to what i did in cryengine. For the detail sprites i used large textures. A single plant was 512x512 pixels. The whole texture being 2048x2048 pixels, maybe that's why it looks super aliased. The danger zone update added from what i had seen only the ability to reflect the sun sprite, other that that in dz_blacksite the 3skybox is foggy, and the water texture is kinda blurry to mask that transition zone.

 

Should be possible to fix the cubemap issue though. Have you applied an env_cubemap to both water volumes?

[Serialmapper]

Yes, in the 3dskybox there is a env_cubemap too.

[Klems]

3 hours ago, Serialmapper said:

Yes, in the 3dskybox there is a env_cubemap too.

Tried picking both water brush to the same cubemap?

[Serialmapper]

I tried, but no effect. I guess these are the source engine limitations. It's not good for a world simulator like UE4 or Cryengine 5, just to name a few. For a non-professional like me, it took around 12 hours to make this map from scratch. A similar map in Cryengine 5.5 editor takes around 2 hours and looks photorealistic. In Far Cry 3 editor an island is generated instantly.

[Yanzl]

The water misalignment is because the scale of the water normal map is controlled by the vmt parameter $flow_normaluvscale. Texture scale in hammer controls the scaling of the flowmap texture, which should actually be something big like 20. To fix the issue you have to create a new vmt for the skybox water and adjust $flow_normaluvscale and $flow_noise_scale -- divide both by 16.  

Here's how wrong Hammer texture scale looks like -- left is default .25 and you get these weird distortions while right is 10 and you get a normal looking water texture. 

[Serialmapper]

As you suggested I made a wmt skybox water derived from the original one (water_ocean_blue) adjusting $flow_normaluvscale and $flow_noise_scale (diving both by 16). Also i remade again the water from the map (scale 160 instead of 4)  and the 3dskybox (scale 10 instead of .25). The problems are not visible anymore from the player's level but visible only from certain angles, if you fly by at the map/skybox junction. Weirdly from those angles the texture doesn't seem to be misaligned but somehow the reflection are. However this is already very nit-picky and i think depends on the environment lightning angle and the skybox texture as well. 

At least now i know what parameters to modify in order to create a proper skybox water material.

Thank you!

Edited December 28, 2018 by Serialmapper

[Yanzl]

One thing you can also do is to add $flow_debug 1 to both water vmts which will allow you to see the flowmap texture. Then try to align that between 3D skybox and level like you'd do with a regular texture. Delete $flow_debug 1 once you're done and hopefully it'll be seamless. 

[Serialmapper]

I checked, no problem detected. The "misalignment" problem it's visible only from certain angles. On lower quality textures like the default ones it's not visible or barely visible.(maybe that's why cs:go doesn't have higher quality default water textures... just saying).  I never encountered such issues with regular (non animated) textures when making 3skyboxes.   Maybe the skycamera is the problem, the code within.

 

 

[RA7]

Pimped

[Serialmapper]

I made a fantasy island in cryengine 5.5 sandbox using free assets form their marketplace. I wish that source engine could look like this and to be so easy to work with. 

 

Edited December 30, 2018 by Serialmapper