WE FORGOT NOTHING

also, sweeet :) 

Looks great. Excellent brushwork and texturing. :) :) :) Wish I could give more constructive feedback, but I can't!

Now hurry up and light it! 

Yes yes good. Only thing I can criticise is the curved ramp needs trim on the corner as the panels are too abruptly cut off at the mo. 

Got bored of working on Base maps so I've been laying out some Medieval themed levels. Started five or so, these three actually have a fair bit of gameplay now.

Ruined castle, entities missing in the shot, sorry

Dungeon thing

Big lava thing. Too open to really run properly so needs some chopping


Seriously if anyone who likes doing architecture wants to help me finish some of these sometime I'm totally up for that. :E 

The problem with that kind of maps is that good lighting is way too much work. Might work with some radiosity, not sure. 

Careful with big open areas, those can easily get out of control. Otherwise, try compiling without doing a lightbake or get brighter lighting - map looks huge but hard to get a sense of it. 

Careful with big open areas, those can easily get out of control.

http://necros.quaddicted.com/temp/outofhand.jpg
'i'll just make a little canyon...'

i get a little nauseous when i open it up in the editor now. i'm determined to finish it though. 

Necros looks like you have a real piece of art there! Hurry up and finish it!!! 

yeah, i'm going to try to finish it for real. i was saving it for qexpo, but i don't think there's enough interest this year. 

Yeah atm just lighting big stuff with a sunlight + ambient. When basic geometry is finished will then switch off the ambient, dim the sun and put in torches and such.

The ruins one I was actually thinking about VIS when setting it out so for the most part it works okay. The only problem is the lake of slime just suddenly stopping at the edge, but nothing I can really do about that. 

Also Necros what grid size were you generally laying out your brushes for terrain there?

I still can't get the hang of terrain at all :( 

16. for the super far away stuff along the edges, you can maybe get away with 64, but if you do too much 64, you can tell even when it's far away-- things just look very coarse and mechanical.
so you should remember to occasionally put in minute details even on far away terrain to make sure that it doesn't look like 'far away' terrain.

for making tri-souped terrain in general;

if you don't have the patience to do it by hand, you can always give a terrain generator a try. of course, that has it's own problems as you now have to make a height map image for the generator to use, and that's an art in it's own right. or you can use a fancy generator like the one in bryce to get access to crazy cool fractal generators and erosion and such and then export the height map and plug it into the generator.
my beef with terrain generators is that they will output the trisouping in a uniform manner irregardless of terrain features.
this makes things a little less efficient (smooth areas can be made with larger brushes, but a generator will just make a lot of brushes with small height differences) and if you're trying to make specific things like cliffs and such, you'll have to tear out the generated brushes and rebuild it which sort of defeats the purpose of generating in the first place.

if you want to do it by hand, first, make sure you actually have the patience. it's very long and can get boring.

next, depending on the type of terrain you're going to make, you should lay out the 'key points' in the terrain first and work out the height differences.
so make all your peaks first, even if they are a single brush.

then you'll want to lay down the player path next.

finally, you just connect everything together while trying to make it look interesting. this is the long and potentially boring part.

it helps playing games that use outdoor terrain a lot. it can keep you stoked about your own terrain and stop you from burning out whilst working on it. lucky i got borderlands. ^_^; 

Make your brushes triangles (two triangles per one square on the grid) and play with their vertices accordingly?

not-a-mapper talking, so feel free to disregard. 

 

one tip i have to speed things up:

when you copy and paste the current triangle, instead of rearranging each vertex to fit onto the last, mirror the brush in both x and y axis. you can now match up any line on the triangle to the opposite line of the previous triangle (that you copied from). this means you only have to modify a single vertex instead of 3. speeds things up a lot. 

make a bunch of triangles (maybe if I'm feelin' frisky, say 12) then I arrange them in the top-down view, then I start moving the edges up and down by using the handle between the two vertically aligned vertexes on one vertical edge of each prism. Yeah it takes a while, but put some good tunes on while you are doing it and it becomes easier. Or the TV on in the background. Or both ;) 

 

 

slide that brush in there... oh yeah, align those vertices, align them good! 

time to apply some caulk 

Thanks for the feedback.

@Ricky: I'm eager to light it as well, but I'm gonna finish up all the brushwork before moving on to entities. I'd say I'm about halfway finished with architecure and layout, so lighting won't commence for a while unfortunately!

@Shambler: Thanks, I'll see what I can do about the ramp. 

I was more just curious about what general sizes he was going for. Cause you could spend ages with a tiny grid size and shitloads of brushes :p 

Brush size too I guess 

 

s'not what I heard :(