de_dunes

[rbx775_]

de_dunes plays in the african desert featuring an organic map layout. Set on a racetrack located around rocks and crumbled sandstone ruins, you'll have to play around crashed or abandoned rallye cars for cover.
Eventhough desert themed maps are already available in CS2 I try to set it apart just a bit by shifting the mood to a more Dune-styled desert. Hope it'll work!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261128705

Heres a ref board to get a feel of the visuals:

Currently working on the blockouts for the maps layout in blender.
Thanks for the opportunity Mapcore!

Edited August 9 by rbx775_

[rbx775_]

Hey guys, Im quite familiar with blender, so for a while I was concepting in there.
Simple draw node setup:

As soon as something clicked I added height to it to make and break sight lines.

Afterwards I populated the space with some themed covers like trucks, buggies and rocks.

Rendering dev textures and skyboxes is also conveniently done in blender.

And thats the current state of de_dunes! Its playable here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261128705

I will have to switch to Hammer eventually, but until then I enjoy tinkering in blender.

Thanks for reading.

Edited August 9 by rbx775_

[eNNercY]

nice workflow! what addon do you use to  paint the mesh in blender?

[rbx775_]

Thanks! Those are just custom geometry nodes, no addons.
You basically just add a subdivided plane and delete faces were the user drew a certain vertex paint value.
Then extrude edges were face neighbours count is equal to one, quite simple.

But its only for concepting, Id say - later layouts should probably be redone.

[RazzleDazzle1]

This is a neat project an an innovative way to design a CS map

[Andre Valera]

@rbx775_ looking forward to checking this one out! The racing theme is really shining! 

Cheers!

Also the workshop link currently doesn't work! I'll edit this part out as soon as it's back. (unless it's me somehow )

[rbx775_]

@Andre Valera Yes it is! I was anticipating your submission, good job on that. Very solid layout in my opinion.
Also thx for letting me know that the link was faulty, at least the naming let to my workshop page. I updated my initial post!

[rbx775_]

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!

Edited August 9 by rbx775_