jameswilddev2

To recap following my absence: I did about half a day's work, lost it, then didn't feel like doing anything at all for the following week. But I return...

That might be normal... I recall a lot of skies from EF being like that at least; the environment mapping stuff in the shader isn't supported by the editor, and no fallback texture has been provided.

That's very neat, I had no idea it existed, thanks!

This looks normal mapped, or maybe custom textures to fit the lights. How'd you do it? Looks good.

Working on the high poly of the "underpass" which runs under the diagonal corridor. In the background the eastern wing is visible. Also started thinking about how to build the background. Quake 3's skybox system is quite easy to produce textures for with Blender's camera system, but given some parts of the backdrop come quite close to the player and the sky cube has no depth, I'm going to have to include some parts of the backdrop as models. Began experimenting with sculpting the cliff the base sits on. I have only limited experience with sculpting and that is getting on for two years ago. I think the material is what is holding this back more than anything though. Will have to see how it bakes tomorrow.

As someone working on a map built entirely from models, what kind of problems should I be looking out for? I imagine stock Quake 3 might not be very well optimised for this kind of map as meshes were used more for details and not for structural stuff; given the mesh gets baked into the map precomputed visibility might be done but I doubt it. Lightmapping might be tricky I guess; I recall having to make separate UV sets in UE3, but I'm showing my meshes fullbright.

Is that better? It was showing up before as a thumbnail here; not sure if that was a browser thing. They were showing up as links on my phone.

GTKRadiant has a 4-viewport mode; go to Edit->Preferences->Interface->Layout and it's one of the four layouts selectable along the top.

That's a good question actually - my entire map is being done as big static room-sized mesh chunks. At present, I'm exporting them in such a way that there's a big pile of meshes around 0, 0, 0, but the content of those meshes is usually about 2000 units away. If I understand from what I've been reading, misc_model is compiled into the map itself. I suspect, but cannot yet confirm, that this means the transform is baked into the mesh and the pivot point is lost completely.

I'm liking the planks; most Quake maps are very regular and lean heavily on patterns in their geometry. Is that BSP? How is it to run on? Also, is that some bloom? Is that something stock Q3 can do? I recall Jedi Knight having bloom but I thought that was a custom extension.

You were 100% correct on it being a bit big Sprony. I like the height for how it plays but will bring some of the details closer to the floor (I'm partway up a jump here)

Baked to low-poly geometry. This is a relatively quick test bake with only 25 iterations; final render will be 150 at double the resolution.

It doesn't look like much progress but it's the fourth rebuild of the room. Beginning to learn the performance characteristics and limitations of Blender's Cycles engine. I'll be showing a test bake soon.

Hmm. It's not been going well. I've been at work this week so I haven't had a lot of time to put into this, but it seems the approach I was taking does not scale well; with only one room done, a bake takes a few hundred megabytes short of all of my RAM, and far too long to bake to be practical. I might need to make stylistic adjustments...

Yes, nearing the last couple of weeks I'll rent a server so you all can playtest your maps. Awesome, I look forward to playing some of that!