[wip] - Last Bastion [Archive] - Steam Users' Forums

shotgunefx

03-24-2011, 06:30 PM

Since all my previous threads were nuked... a recap. Last Bastion is a campaign set in South Boston aka "Southie" where you have to fight your way to Fort Independence (Castle Island)

I've started working on map two, right now, just roughing out the geometry. Not very detailed, also, the terrain is just a placeholder. I'm not using my terrain and curb displacement generators until finished. Just easier to work with when the ground is flat. The Sketchup tools I've been working on are making it go relatively quick, this is only a few days of work.

For reference, this link on Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=472+W+Broadway,+Boston,+Suffolk,+Massachuset ts+02127&ll=42.338102,-71.038198&spn=0.012689,0.033023&t=h&z=16&layer=c&cbll=42.3381,-71.037967&panoid=5q4JsBICWXYMmPzkC-zLIQ&cbp=12,102.11,,0,-9.3) will start you at the same location as the first screen shot.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5223/5557509072_ea9c5709cd_z.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5097/5557509192_70a8e3cd99_z.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5185/5556924103_73f1b7d39c_z.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5028/5556924279_0b936c2506_z.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5029/5557509672_c05c3fef9b_z.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5106/5557509838_177d6b1462_z.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5103/5557509968_aa606a7062_z.jpg

shotgunefx

03-24-2011, 06:36 PM

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5186/5557510148_475dc8b3ac_z.jpg

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shotgunefx

03-24-2011, 06:37 PM

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5176/5557511612_a8535dc756_z.jpg

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ThaiGrocer

03-24-2011, 07:51 PM

Glad you brought this thread back from the accidental purge. It's looking fantastic and I hope to learn more details about your ways on avoiding development hell.

shotgunefx

03-25-2011, 05:41 PM

Glad you brought this thread back from the accidental purge. It's looking fantastic and I hope to learn more details about your ways on avoiding development hell.

Glad to be working on it again!

So the windows in the power plant, those are just temps. Been working on the models for them. So far, pretty happy with them.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5051/5560018950_1910668e8d_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5135/5560019238_674610d83a_b.jpg

I was having a hard time texturing the curved brick on the arches, and I ALMOST was going to write something to do it, then I thought, I wonder if someone else already has? So I found Thomthom's UV Toolkit2 (http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=18992)for sketchup, there is a function called Fit Textures to Quad Faces that made it a snap!

zapwizard

03-25-2011, 09:57 PM

shotgunefx

03-26-2011, 01:13 AM

First get Shotgunefx's texturing plug-in:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1767058

And to texture a arch, first texture the top brick front face, then wrap that around to the bottom face, then wrap that to the bottom faces of the next brick. Use the bottom of each brick then to texture the front face. This will auto-rotate the material as you move around. (Kinda hard to explain)

Have you tried yet to export a face that has a three way stretched texture? (length, width, and skewed)
I thought that VMF only supported texture scaling, not skewing.

As far as feedback on your map, the buildings all look great. But there is quite a bit of empty space between them.

The old alt-click road trick doesn't really work for brick (or other repeating patterns), what happens is the mortal lines make the edges quite apparent.

Unfortunately, as well as that quad face plugin works, on the export a few of the faces don't take. But still, I'd rather touch 5 out of 50 faces, then do 50 by hand....

You can see, to the left of the arch, that the bricks scale is way off. (Also interesting how different bump maps look on LightmappedGeneric and VertexlitGeneric)

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5138/5560151623_2c7fbbfef7_b.jpg

Looks fine in Sketchup. Even if I cut the model in half and flip it and paste it on the other end, it still gets messed up on one side only. Guessing it has something to do with triangulating the SMDs.

The other downer is it maps the whole texture to a quad face, so I had to make a smaller one, seeing it's open source, maybe I'll extend it to a subset of the material selection. I'd rather not make extra materials if at all possible.

As far as I know, you can only have UV scaling in VMF, technically you can have your UV reside in a plane that isn't on the face and you *might* be able to approximate it, but it's technically an error and probably won't do what you want (If hammer doesn't choke on it).

Thanks for the feedback. I'm only a few days in, a lot is still missing, but actually if you look at that area on Google Maps, you'll see it's pretty sparse for those few blocks. Lot's of open lots, granted they'll have a lot of stuff in em, but it's a pretty open industrial area. That Greyhound takes up half a block by itself. The area you're looking at (near the ratty garage) is the transition from 2-3. Slightly beyond is a giant park, then tightly packed residential.

jsmucha

03-26-2011, 08:33 AM

-I've been wondering if you have a WIP going on after all you know that you teach everyone. =]

zapwizard

03-26-2011, 10:06 AM

shotgunefx

03-27-2011, 05:12 AM

Wow I was tired when I replied, and didn't notice I told you to get your own plugin. :confused:

Does anyone know if you make two VMTs: one for models, one for brushes, and they both reference the same VTF..is only one texture loaded into memory? Since the different between the VMTs is just shader stuff, I would think it would load a texture only once.

I was pretty tired myself, I didn't get that you were telling ME to get it either lol.

You know, as far as the VMTs, i had the same question. I had asked something similar (in the deleted thread), and while I get the impression that is the case, I don't know for sure. I'd also like to know the cost of colored VMTs, so many types of siding. I'm trying to keep textures down and use a lot of colored versions.

So, manage to get a bit more roughed in. Keep in mind, the "ground" in this pic is not the size of the map, not even close.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5303/5564071704_aa1737d30a_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5188/5564072410_c90011b549_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5251/5564072596_bd92ee0735_b.jpg

An oddity with displacements I've discovered. It seems like if another brush resides in the same place as a displacement, it doesn't show through.

Take this building. One of the problems I have is so many of the houses I'm modeling are so box like. So I'm trying to subtly make them a little less polygonal.

I figured one way would be to use displacements for parts of the houses to make the lighting and shadows a little smoother, like this one.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5308/5563485535_b6126b6d18_b.jpg

I figured for houses like this with two colors (and there are a lot), I could just displace the top, not worry about the difference in brush vs displacement lighting, but I'm getting a gap. (and the displacement is not displaced on the edges)

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5013/5564067880_01916ba8b2_z.jpg

So, I had a nodraw "behind" the displacement for vis purposes, so I figued if I painted it toolsblack or something, that would hide it like so.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5183/5563505925_b4e62d983d_z.jpg

Not only is the toolsblack not visible through the gap, it's not visible even when the displacement sinks below it. Really weird.

Also took a pass at putting the model arches in, I've got to play with the lighting, when your flashlight isn't on it, looks pretty terrible.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5260/5563488947_375e305764_b.jpg

shotgunefx

03-29-2011, 11:47 PM

Little update. Got most of the exterior of the saferoom done.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5226/5573357504_d50d3bc08f_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5134/5573357892_672e3fa1c4_b.jpg

Also took a pass at the Edison (power plant) arches.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5066/5571961641_a1690d2d6c_b.jpg

Doesn't look too bad but still needs some work, I started re-texturing the curves in KHED, which was a total pain, for some reason, it's exporting almost every face with it's own copy of material, which means I have hundreds that I have to group and manually assign. GRRR.

But I realized something worse. You can't really texture like that in SMD. I was forgetting it triangulates everything. Cant' have a texture in a quad projection on a triangle. Well you can, but doesn't look quite right (wavy mortar lines). Probably why the SMD export borks the UVs in the first place.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5228/5573069975_7954d6d01b_z.jpg

That leaves me with two options. Increase the poly count so it's not as obvious, or B, make a single texture for all of the "wedge" faces so I can just planar project it on. Sketchup actually does have a function to make unique textures like that off of textured faces, but I'm trying to keep my materials down and it would have to be at least 1024x1024 I think, even optimized for space.

zapwizard

03-30-2011, 11:12 AM

Do the brick arches have to be perfect?
In the screenshot the arches look great.

shotgunefx

03-30-2011, 11:43 AM

Do the brick arches have to be perfect?
In the screenshot the arches look great.

Thanks Zap, you know, one of the reasons it's going so much faster this go round is just keeping "good enough" in mind and not going bogged down on tiny differences in the details. They actually don't look bad from the ground, but if you're on the roof (or a Hunter near it)

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5254/5574951114_c621d9145b_o.jpg

And the faces with tiny UVs get a lot of noise when you're moving around from the mipmapping.

I could have had it fixed in khed relatively quick, but the hundreds of copies of the 4 materials is killing me. That's why I may try the Sketchup way of combining textures, the UVs will be nice and flat,1:1, even if they do get screwed up.

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=21847

Keldorn

03-30-2011, 12:04 PM

shotgunefx

03-30-2011, 12:28 PM

Looks good. The streets though are bit wide. Even if there on scale with real life. Wide street likes that can create gameplay issues. Hassle to cross over multiple times, too wide needing more detailing hurting performance, texture patterns visible etc. In my campaign I made my roads 512 units. But later on I regretted that bcuase of those issues, but the map was too developed at that point to change the width. (From now I'm always going for 300 units). When you got 300 unit road, and 128 units side walk on each side the buildings towering over the players it creates a nice cozy feeling while playing. ;)

There are only 3 "wide" roads that show up anywhere in the campaign. That safe room sits at the intersection of 2 of them. Most of the streets are normal size, if not smaller.

I see what you mean, the thing is, besides looking off, some of it would look downright wrong, for instance a bus terminal that can't fit a bus in it (and it's already smaller than IRL). Almost all of 1st is industrial.

But the other areas you'll be going through are all much narrower, tightly packed houses, with tons of rooftops to attack from, and alleys between every couple of houses to run out of.

I figure to break up the pacing, I'll just force the path through backyards and sideyards, and when I want a breather, direct them through the wider areas, like the park.

Also as far as the bus terminal, in all likelyhood, a bus crash will be blocking the street forcing you to fight your way all through the terminal complex, out through the back, or having to fight through the area where the giant "barn" is. Keep in mind, thats nothing but a placeholder. That whole yard will be filled with bricks and pallets.

I'm hoping to have two paths at all points at least if I can, but it also means double my work, so we'll see how long I keep that up.

shotgunefx

03-30-2011, 05:57 PM

Kind of frivolous, but anyone from around Southie would be wondering where the Scally caps are...
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5268/5575792454_efbea2bb97_o.jpg

I'm going to attach them to commons here and there

shotgunefx

03-31-2011, 12:11 PM

More frivolousness

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5310/5576997021_9c18605efb_b.jpg

Unfortunately, part of the hat is slightly visible in the FOV.

Anyway, back to more important stuff. In the deleted threads, one of the problems I had a while ago was tinted materials ($color2). If I used the same parameters and base textures in a LightmappedGeneric and a VertexLitGeneric, they would look totally different like so (top pic is same settings as the house)

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4088/4969253871_edded087e1_z.jpg

I have a LOT of houses to make, and most of them have siding, so I figured like 2 textures with 20 or so tints, and a few awning models and supports with skins (that also use the tinted texs), I could have a ton of variety and still a low budget.

But because of how differently they work, it's a total PITA matching colors. Anyway, I revisited it and found a good formula. Doesn't always work, but almost always does. Add .4 to the RGB of the LightmappedGeneric. It's usually a good match, though occasionally, you may need to go .5, weird how differently they are lit (and it's not a lighting issue)

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5265/5577601348_00e6b82e62_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5067/5577001301_2c401f77ed_z.jpg

Keldorn

03-31-2011, 12:27 PM

haha
Nick looks like an Irish hoodlum from the prohibition era.

shotgunefx

03-31-2011, 12:32 PM

haha
Nick looks like an Irish hoodlum from the prohibition era.

Perfect, because that's pretty much what I was going for :)

Paddy Nick the Mic lol. Southie is quite Irish (or was, still a lot but used to be mostly), 3/4 leathers are not uncommon, and a scally is far from a rare sight. Actually outside of the hat, it would not be unusual to see me wearing that. That's why I was goofing with the skin last year. I was seeing how far I could go without modding the model

HellaLouYaah

03-31-2011, 02:33 PM

That looks freaking awesome, the textures are really well done too! So I guess you decmpiled the model? Mine still decompiles all weird and that, I wonder what the issue is?

shotgunefx

03-31-2011, 02:41 PM

That looks freaking awesome, the textures are really well done too! So I guess you decmpiled the model? Mine still decompiles all weird and that, I wonder what the issue is?

Actually I didn't, the texture stuff, I just edited the vtf's in photoshop (like a year ago), added some grain to the jacket, the hat I just made, I'm attaching it with scripts. Kind of a pain as the FORWARD bone varies for the survivors and even different models of common (well, actually they have head, not forward)

shotgunefx

03-31-2011, 02:43 PM

I'm hoping I can get it not visible in the FOV, it's not attached like a weapon though so I don't know if I can use viewmodels, but it would be pretty cool to have an event where they need gasmasks or respirators to not take damage.

HellaLouYaah

03-31-2011, 02:49 PM

shotgunefx

03-31-2011, 02:56 PM

Huh, crazy stuff that it works so good, I didn't even realize it was still the same model.

About the hat getting in the player view, make the base model that is a null of invisible model(or material), and then add and LOD 1 or greater that is the actually model. It's like an inverse LOD, lol.

$lod 1
{
replacemodel "null" "scally.smd"
}

Or you can just do similar with the material, like a base one thats invisible, and then "replacematerial" with the actual material.

edit: This will work then for you, you may have to adjust the LOD to like 1.6 or something but it does work since the other players cant get too close due to the hitboxes.

You are the man! I was wondering if I could use LOD for that. I'll have to give it a shot later. I do think it would be pretty cool as a mechanic to, say, give you a choice between finding some respirators and being able to take your time going through an area, or take your chances and just rush through will taking small but continuous damage on the chance you won't get slowed down.

HellaLouYaah

03-31-2011, 03:14 PM

shotgunefx

03-31-2011, 03:53 PM

Haha, well it should work for you, hopefully up to your needs. Note, I had to use "removemodel" first in my .qc, but I can't remember why, but just keep it in mind maybe.

I'm using this for my 2nd map where you have to search for a fuel pump, and bring it back to the broken down vehicle. It attaches to the medkit attachment though, so it isn't as visible/far from player root.

I may have some questions when I give it a go, I'm trying to not get too sidetracked right now (which I love to do)

So now that I've got the whole material difference, mostly worked out...

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5190/5577487665_51c292e3b3_b.jpg

Lots and lots of siding. Actually the biggest pain was making the tool textures, not I'll just have to add those skins

shotgunefx

03-31-2011, 05:05 PM

So the .4 across rule worked out ok. Most of them match pretty well, would probably match better except the LightmappedGeneric is bumped.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5094/5578382432_cb5c751c88_z.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5147/5577797481_752ca84d9a_z.jpg

It's tougher with very light shades because you clamp. If you look at the pink and lilac, they are off quite a bit...

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5054/5577797147_b8dd8e4707_z.jpg

But I dont' think that can be helped, the white on the left, neither are tinted and they are both using the same exact texture. As you can see the awning model is much darker
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5017/5578383246_f6cd464bbe_z.jpg

shotgunefx

03-31-2011, 09:07 PM

So fun fact, just finished making the other type of colored sidings, then I went to skin one of my awning models with the new variants. Wouldn't compile, apparently you can only have 32 skins (or it may be 32 materials, as in, two material swaps per skin = 16 skins).

update
It's materials, not skins, so if you had 4 materials and wanted to swap 2 per skin, (32-4) / 2 = 14 skins

zapwizard

04-01-2011, 08:45 AM

You doing those as skins rather then the color setting in hammer?

shotgunefx

04-01-2011, 09:39 AM

You doing those as skins rather then the color setting in hammer?

It's funny you should mention that zap, I was thinking about that myself last night after I wrote that. The original thought was that I could still tint the model, in addition to the color vmt, so the woodwork could be tinted, and still have the same panels (though in practice, it bleeds through a bit to the siding vmt, but not usually noticable)

But after thinking about it, it seems that a more practical idea would be to make 5 or 6 colors of trim and a couple shingles (alpha so they can't be tinted) and use those for the skins, and rendercolor for the panels. I'll just need to make a list of what rendercolor matches which vmt

Also, as far as the .4 across, on the second siding, which is white as well, but a bit less luminosity, the values are .2 .2 .2, so no hard and fast formula there

shotgunefx

04-02-2011, 05:13 AM

I figured I'd try adding a tiny bit of light near the "lit" window models. I like it, gives it a more texture, for lack of a better word

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5307/5581409849_0663c7f6d8_b.jpg

So, back to arches, it seems like no matter what, if a texture is skewed in sketchup, it imports wrong, so I did the old Alt-Click road trick in hammer, just using a bit more pollys. Came out well. Each vertical segment of 4 arches is a model.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5110/5581994738_afdc20027b_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5133/5581407541_65aaa22c5a_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5175/5581995152_49545e322d_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5183/5581995300_82bd622f74_b.jpg

Need to figure how much of this building I want to open up. I really liked how the lighting looked, so I actually did a little detailing. IRL, this is where SHAGS, the salon that has (or had) a show on MTV, maybe I'll just skip that because I like the whole atmosphere of the (admittedly bare) set up.
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5014/5581995618_e721413cae_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5013/5581995766_d596f0b5d5_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5069/5581997882_7571f153f1_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5172/5581410141_7529cd1d62_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5178/5581996760_e8d9a0c834_b.jpg

AWSmith11

04-02-2011, 05:22 AM

daaamn

zapwizard

04-02-2011, 08:08 AM

The building looks great. But if you do let players into the interior, make sure those windows don't reach the ceiling.

Rectus

04-02-2011, 10:04 AM

Very nice work on the architecture, it looks even better than the real life buildings.

shotgunefx

04-02-2011, 03:53 PM

Thanks guys.

It's funny you mention that ceiling line zap, I spent an inordinate amount of time myself thinking about it. Like how much detail or time I should spend on SI only spawn rooms.

Originally that's all it was. Was gonna be mostly bare. I noticed the lack of frame and said.. meh, was even going to leave off the fire escape for that reason.

Then I liked the lighting and what not and dressed it up a bit. But I'm still on the fence if it's going to be player accessible.

But I'm also kind of working in broad strokes too. I have so much more to do and I'm afraid of hitting entity limits too early and then having to go cut a bunch of stuff out.

So I'll probably go back and touch that up and keep it player accessible, also add a little goodbye note, pic of wife, some other props, just cause I think it's nice atmosphere-wise. If I'm going to open it up more, maybe I'll make a gibbable model for the window (frames, top and bottom included)

shotgunefx

04-03-2011, 05:24 AM

One thing I'm lucky with, even though there a ton of houses, a lot of them were built in lots. People would use buy land, and build 2 to 8 houses at a time, so you have a lot of houses adjoining or near each other that are very similar, either mirrored or some slight change. So with a few variants, I was able to knock off a good ten houses, with some tweaks, I'll get 5 more out of it which almost puts me in the park.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5070/5584456219_a6410808a4_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5295/5585047254_5554409372_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5259/5585046762_4ae9a1609b_b.jpg

Of course the next intersection is old and has tons of ornate stuff. Obviously these are just roughed out. Still all kinds of detailing to add. Also need to make some more trim models, but a lot of ground for a short period.

Also need to figure out when or how I should actually put in the real terrain and how I want to divey that up. Once I hit the park (which I will shortly) I pretty much have to work with the real terrain as opposed to the flat. Also, can't really do anything with the yards or anything until it's laid on the displacements. I'll probably do it block by block.

shotgunefx

04-04-2011, 09:31 PM

So today was mostly modeling. Bay windows are pretty common and the bays themselves usually fall into one or two sizes, so I made new narrow windows and other trims. Awnings I have three sizes that will cover most of my bases, I just made one or two for each.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5181/5590748635_79a55fc8e0_b.jpg

On the plus side, I can easily go back and make new models and create variations as needed without having to touch anything but the model name.

Also added a variation of the skinned window that has a tintable frame. Been meaning to do it forever as most of the houses here have them.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5222/5591340968_fd307f72e5_b.jpg

Of course it still screws up the "black" window. It's not that noticeable, so I just might leave it. I can always make a separate model for that later
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5099/5591340276_d1d442b045_z.jpg

I definitely have to add a bunch more skins though for the window.

One other thing that bugs me, the sky is so overcast, and the cubemaps so lowres, often the windows just looked grayed out in the reflection

shotgunefx

04-08-2011, 08:57 AM

So still cranking it out. The building behind the Cahill building, originally wasn't going to be open at all, but then I figured it would be good optimization practice (areaportal_window's, hints, etc)

It came out pretty good, still pretty sparse, and need to make some warehouse props but not bad.

Also learned a few things. The way I had it set up, my model would disappear inside the portal, inside the building if you were far enough back giving that nodraw look.

So I attempted to use the foreground model, which didn't quite work. I was using one portal for 3 windows, and the windows were all prop_dynamics named the same, so they should all fade in and out together.... Nope.

Seems like there is a bug, if the name for foreground model corresponds to more than one prop, ONE always gets turned off at map load and is invisible, I added a trigger_auto to turn them on and now work great.

One other issue, it all looked great until I put that giant light on it, now the open/close is a bit noticeable on those windows. I'll make a new tooltexture that's close to the glass color and paint the func_brushes that so it won't be so obvious.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5301/5600239061_800186c088_b.jpg
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5066/5600238949_0eb1225262_b.jpg
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5025/5600238469_17792f606c_b.jpg
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5026/5600825368_1d6ff12361_b.jpg
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5301/5600239061_800186c088_b.jpg
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5307/5600823020_3e7942c121_b.jpg
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5306/5600823760_1f7c44a89f_b.jpg

continued...

shotgunefx

04-08-2011, 09:03 AM

I also cleaned up the Cahill building too. Didnt' realize the other two sides needed so much work which after looking at more reference photos I realized. I'll probably open a lot more of it up now. The lighting needs work, SMD is really hard to match to brush work.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5224/5600238275_2320cf9b51_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5149/5600242045_5898067cbc_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5101/5600824798_529b199c6d_b.jpg

The overview... coming along quite nicely.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5229/5600826572_eaf00c2596_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5303/5600824124_47c66984eb_b.jpg

I will say, even in the rudimentary stages, the alleys and roofs are awesome. Attacks can come from anywhere and having to go through the sideyards can be incredibly dangerous. This is definitely going to be hard on the survivors.

zapwizard

04-08-2011, 01:02 PM

shotgunefx

04-08-2011, 01:43 PM

Looks good.
I find the trick with making BSP and SMD work together is to keep the SMD chunks smaller so there isn't a huge difference in lighting. It makes placement a bit more tedious, but is also means there are more instances of smaller props instead of large unique chunks, which speeds things up a bit.

That's how I originally did the arches, but almost all of the vertical segments where one of two types, so it seemed to make sense to group them and take the prop count down from 195 static props to 39 just for the arches, and of course, much easier to align.

Another odd area portal thing I noticed. I made a green unlit generic for use on the func_brushes that occlude the windows (which use an areaportal_window), oddly enough unlitgeneric does not work. Kept showing up white.

Run the map without the portals, normal color. Re-enable them and it shows up white again. Also on that note, using toolswhite tinted did not work either. Showed up white. Originally I thought it was some magic property of the toolswhite vtf but I think it's just another oddity, as tinted unlit generics work ok elsewhere.

Changing the vmt to LightmappedGeneric fixed it. Another problem I ran into. I had pipes in the warehouse (models/props_pipes/concrete_pipe_filler02.mdl), but it has no collision, so I approximated it with a clip brush, but it's too steep, so I figured I'd just make it a displacement so I could better approximate it. Was very easy but....

After that vbsp got borked. From the console output, looked like it worked from the output, but it returned an error to the OS, you could even compile it with vvis and vrad, but when you actually loaded the map, all craziness. Things flitting in and out of existence every other frame, console spam about vvis bit compression overflows (or something to that effect), and the displacement was really simple. Destroying it fixed it. (The displacement also made vvis take 23 mins longer). Weird, never seen anything like that before.. at least it was an easy fix.

Oilcake

04-09-2011, 07:08 PM

Murphy's Law! :D

shotgunefx

04-11-2011, 08:50 AM

So haven't had too much time, starting working on porch models. Not too shabby, probably will dirty em up at some point a bit.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5189/5610217536_c556451b5c_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5143/5609638837_2a1144ab40_b.jpg

Turned down the env mapping on the windows a bit. I think they look better with the overcast sky.
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5189/5609639601_622f2c6bdc_b.jpg

Also started playing with particles, because why not...
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5264/5610218578_7ea1c0bc6c_b.jpg

Acermors

04-11-2011, 11:16 AM

Man, I love coming in here and seeing the work you've done, shotgun. :)

Also started playing with particles, because why not...
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5264/5610218578_7ea1c0bc6c_b.jpg

Are those env_sprites on the smokestacks in the level or the 3D skybox? (Or are those the particles you were talking about?) :O

turistas

04-11-2011, 12:25 PM

this looks crazy, i love it!!! i can't wait to play it.

shotgunefx

04-11-2011, 02:11 PM

Man, I love coming in here and seeing the work you've done, shotgun. :)
Are those env_sprites on the smokestacks in the level or the 3D skybox? (Or are those the particles you were talking about?) :O
Thanks!
The sprites are in the map and are in fact sprites, the smoke was the particles I was working on. The default ones are too brown for the skybox, looked weird. Though the smoke is in fact in the skybox). I haven't really bothered with the skybox yet, because nothing is at it's final height yet. Once I wrap up those blocks, I can transfer them to the real terrain and height adjust them, then build those cheap copies in the skybox.

I'll also need to do some testing to make sure vvis won't go nuts. I'm trying to cheat as much as I can by keeping houses on the exact same line as opposed to varying the fronts, but the height I can't. I can flatten some areas a bit but I'm about at the park and I need those hills.

Also need to figure out what I want to do with the park, I really want to have it open, but having it all open means so many houses (and many really ornate)
http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/leeland/ge1.jpg

I'm also not sure I can "block it off" without it seeming a bit contrived. If I cut it behind the field, there's a fence there already, just need to block the stairs and the street, and it'll cut about 3 blocks worth of detailed houses, but I'm on the fence. The park would be pretty cool and there's a lot of cool creepy looking houses.
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4107/4965792582_eb95acf377_z.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4129/4965202891_75ece0126c_z.jpg
I suppose I could just make the fog much denser so I could at least cheap out on the other side of Broadway.

this looks crazy, i love it!!! i can't wait to play it.
Thanks, me too! At this rate, I might actually finish it this time

BlazingNova

04-11-2011, 08:17 PM

I love how you're building locations via street view, and those are some pretty awesome pics above this post.

shotgunefx

04-13-2011, 10:37 PM

I love how you're building locations via street view, and those are some pretty awesome pics above this post.

Streetview is indispensable for an IRL mapping project. The first time I goofed around with making a map around here (which was l4d1), was just way too hard only in hammer. I have a lot of good pics from that night, the fog was insane, literally went there to get reference photos for this.

So back to current going-ons... Here's something special I'm working on. Not sure how it'll fit into everything yet, but one thing I've always hated was the whole Nav A-Z thing. I always thought you should be able to segment up a mission without forcing it through nav, as in, go to point X, accomplish Y then go to Z, without forcing the nav to flow through X,Y and only X to Y to Z, and manually blocking everything up.

So here's a little test with 13 "Goals", in it, the goal is to just go to the vicinity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZVPHOcH-U4

Also got around to making some of the "goofier" houses. Not sure how I feel about them. Some of them with a little work would be better, but they are fairly close to what they are supposed to look like.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5188/5617911367_826d846570_b.jpg

Not crazy about the lighting on the round building. The wood one needs a better texture and some new lower windows, but actually pretty much how it looks in real life.

These on the other hand...

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5223/5617911943_5ee43194a4_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5305/5617912185_807d1103c0_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5223/5617911943_5ee43194a4_b.jpg

These actually are still pretty close but they feel "cheap", the biggest differences between them and the real ones are there is a tiny bit more trim, but mostly just age and decay. That's what makes them look less cartoony, (though pretty cartoony IRL). I guess I'm still not quite at the point where I feel comfortable saying "Yeah, cheap out on this" vs "Yea, do it right", but I really don't want to spend too much of my budget (or time budget) going crazy over things that people will barely interact with.

Thoughts?

shotgunefx

04-14-2011, 03:20 AM

Alright, so I decided to dust off my displacement tools and give a quick sort of proof of concept with the park.
http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/leeland/ge1.jpg

For a couple hours work, not too shabby... especially the walkways.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5063/5618307317_63f1abe728_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5144/5618893476_d868307d2c_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5070/5618307543_0e071dd8bc_b.jpg

The next two pictures illustrate pretty well what I mean by when the houses are on the "real" terrain...
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5101/5618895002_b513bc1590_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5025/5618308621_e14e73aae0_b.jpg

One more from the smokestack
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5021/5618895568_eff13210ba_b.jpg

So for a quick test, pretty good. It does show me a few things, most of which I knew.

I'm going to need to make a ton of trees, and most much bigger. Even at 3/4 scale, the largest tree in the game is like not even half the size and most of the stock models don't look right for even the smaller ones.

I'll need to make a lot of grass variants to break it up.

I'm still on the fence if I let you into the park proper or not (where the web like walkway is), you can see how much detail I've have to fill in house-wise.

I need to think what I actually want to do with the space as well. I mean it to be a bit of a relaxation but it's soooo open. I suppose I could put some sort of encampment in the field.

Lastly, at 3/4 scale, the baseball diamond is way too small.

Xopaa

04-14-2011, 09:25 AM

zapwizard

04-14-2011, 12:51 PM

These actually are still pretty close but they feel "cheap", the biggest differences between them and the real ones are there is a tiny bit more trim, but mostly just age and decay. That's what makes them look less cartoony, (though pretty cartoony IRL). I guess I'm still not quite at the point where I feel comfortable saying "Yeah, cheap out on this" vs "Yea, do it right", but I really don't want to spend too much of my budget (or time budget) going crazy over things that people will barely interact with.

Thoughts?

I think the buildings so far are the base-line geometry. I think they are missing "randomness". Perhaps once you add the plants, gutter pipes, steps and fences it will all sort of come together.
The angle trim on some of the buildings is their signature architectural detail, and should be able to be done as a single simple repeating prop.

shotgunefx

04-14-2011, 03:12 PM

if you want to offset your houses you can vis-cluster the portal mess and it'll draw the line at the border of the vis-cluster.

for height issues use the hint trick from the bible, i like to put mine about a foot over any door the players are gonna be walking out of. keep in mind that if the tops of two leafs are coplaner, they are still considered visible.

got 15000 polys of vehicle that magically renders around the corner? box it off with hints.

are your streets displacements? hint, hint. :)

maybe for the park you can just put police line with a player clip along the street on the park side, and have the skybox start across the street. its not perfect but better then cement walls.

map looks good, nice work.

Thanks for all the good tips. My streets and most of the terrain, curbs will be displacements, I have a bit of experience with that from the Island. Those will all be backed by nodraws approximating the lowest height, all buildings will have their foundations pulled to meet the "floor" of the world for visbility.

I'm not sure I quite grok what you mean about leaves being coplanar, and visibility, I mean I grasp what that means, but not in terms of Source.

If I'm understanding you right, this might explain something on my todo.

So are you saying something like this?, let's say I'm in an L Shaped corridor looking down towards the corner, are you saying if everything around the corner that is coplanar with that little piece of wall will be considered visible to?

-------------------------
|VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
| ----------------------
| |
| |
| X|

I think the buildings so far are the base-line geometry. I think they are missing "randomness". Perhaps once you add the plants, gutter pipes, steps and fences it will all sort of come together.
The angle trim on some of the buildings is their signature architectural detail, and should be able to be done as a single simple repeating prop.

There aren't any gutters, stoops or anything because I need to make them all. Nothing in game is remotely right for it. Trying to work in bursts and then figure what assets I can sort of abstract into a more generic forms. Like, I'll need 3 or 4 different sizes of awnings, and probably 4 or 5 variants of each. That sort of thing.

Even the trim you see, most of it is just a place holder. Then I can just make a bunch of variants,skins that I need, or even just to break it up a bit, and just change the model names in the prop_statics. It's a bit of luck, but people in real life housebuilding are lazy and cheap too.

A lot of the houses (like the bays) are fairly close because they were built at the same time, by the same people, reusing the same blueprint to keep the cost down. Of course they might flip it left to right, and a lot of different trims and what not but a lot of re-use. But you're right about the trim, if you look at street view, you'll see for all those similar bay houses, probably 4 different roof trims and 3 flourishes on the bay between floors. So I'll pick a day or two for modeling and knock all that out.

I don't want to start detailing them much until I get them on the real geometry, otherwise I'll have tons of props to tweak and adjust twice.

shotgunefx

04-14-2011, 06:17 PM

So I realized something dumb. The way my displacement generator works (or rather Sketchup works, it interacts with EVERYTHING in the model, hidden or not, and I had a giant GE snapshot hidden. What that means is there was another larger, but lower res terrain mesh overlaying the more detailed closer one. So I spit it out again, and cleaned up the path.

Can I just say how I love that this all sews?
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5302/5620197635_817b959f78_b.jpg

Fits much better and the paths are far better fitting now.
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5302/5620198145_45c7a40b1c_b.jpg

This is pretty much straight out. All I did was add nodraw background for the terrain and then flatten that one piece that segments the park in two as Google doesn't have enough res to capture that. But that only took like 15 mins, since it's flat, I just had to figure out the right height and raise to across.

Though at some point, I'll probably go along and take some of the walkway displacements down to 2 or 3, especially the small chunks like the circle in the middle of the park

shotgunefx

04-15-2011, 01:02 PM

Keep in mind, all still very rough, fog is dialed back, trees are wimpy, yadda yadda...

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5104/5622739248_f0eef5271e_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5267/5622153085_f2726f6144_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5062/5622739606_b87e1c875a_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5307/5622153275_fed4281b83_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5264/5622153633_6e25f520bc_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5106/5622740578_3ce32064b9_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5062/5622741274_7c38158744_b.jpg

Thegreenthing16

04-15-2011, 07:54 PM

I'm loving the lamp lighting, keep it up! :D

shotgunefx

04-15-2011, 08:56 PM

I'm loving the lamp lighting, keep it up! :D

Thanks! Think it's going to need some work though. If the fog is actually dialed in, the lamps disappear way to quick. Like this..

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5304/5623653524_cf8c89c988_b.jpg

You can see it better in this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U16Dj8FLAYU

While I'll never get it as good as it, I'd like something more like this...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3474/3819733386_a8bcf601f1_z.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2626/3819735536_d199001633_z.jpg

I think what I'll have to do is make a light glow particle effect so it doesn't fade out. Maybe I can also make it a little better in other ways given all the options of the particle systems.

The other thing that's bugging me when fogged in, is the contrast against the sky. Not sure what I can do as it's not volumetric fog and just z distance in source. It'll look better when the park is surrounded by geometry, but I still think it'll be noticeable.

I'm thinking maybe I could make a skybox model, more a less a cylinder around the world with a tapered alpha (sort of like what they do in many official maps (black at horizon to clear at the top), but instead make it fog color, and make it much more opaque, then just tweak it's renderamt to make it roll in with the fog.

shotgunefx

04-16-2011, 03:12 AM

So one more update. Cleaned up the wall, started building the playgrounds. Still need to make the bleachers and stands.

Where the upper park slopes to meet the wall was a bit of a pain. The terrain data isn't fine enough to capture that, but the hand massaging wasn't so bad. Still need better textures though.

I will say I think that walkway would make a good gauntlet. Having the higher ground, the SI are tough. Especially if I made it just high enough so you couldn't go up the embankment. I kept having smoker tongues flying through the grass but almost no visibility. The only way you could really hit them is if someone is far ahead, or far back. I'll have to think about it.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5266/5624164674_14c37aafaf_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5146/5623574967_56ea69ddd3_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5067/5623575459_6123bca316_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5309/5624164054_bcba619e54_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5030/5624163912_e9ea211896_b.jpg

turistas

04-16-2011, 06:36 AM

im like determined to play it :p

Rectus

04-16-2011, 07:59 AM

Thanks! Think it's going to need some work though. If the fog is actually dialed in, the lamps disappear way to quick. Like this..

I think what I'll have to do is make a light glow particle effect so it doesn't fade out. Maybe I can also make it a little better in other ways given all the options of the particle systems.

There are some sprite materials that ignore the fog with "$nofog 1", they might provide the glow effect you want.

The other thing that's bugging me when fogged in, is the contrast against the sky. Not sure what I can do as it's not volumetric fog and just z distance in source. It'll look better when the park is surrounded by geometry, but I still think it'll be noticeable.

I'm thinking maybe I could make a skybox model, more a less a cylinder around the world with a tapered alpha (sort of like what they do in many official maps (black at horizon to clear at the top), but instead make it fog color, and make it much more opaque, then just tweak it's renderamt to make it roll in with the fog.

If you add fog with the same parameters in the skybox, the colors blend in really nice with the black model. I've been experimenting with it, and managed to get it looking fairly good, even with aggressive farz culling.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/rectus/screenshot/576665918922832882/?

shotgunefx

04-16-2011, 03:13 PM

im like determined to play it :p
Me too! At the rate it's going this try, it might actually get finished.

There are some sprite materials that ignore the fog with "$nofog 1", they might provide the glow effect you want.

If you add fog with the same parameters in the skybox, the colors blend in really nice with the black model. I've been experimenting with it, and managed to get it looking fairly good, even with aggressive farz culling.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/rectus/screenshot/576665918922832882/?

I'll have to give that a try, I didn't think that would work on glow materials, but who knows. Though wonder if they would fade out or just pop off. I still think I'm gonna give the particle effect a shot, because then maybe I an do some interesting things based on zdistance.

As far as the skybox models, I've done a ton of testing with them in the past, even models that aren't black (and have lights copied into the skybox) and it worked really pretty much perfectly.

The thing I'm more worried about is that my sky is relatively defined. I suppose I could make it more hazy looking, but I do like the tumultuous looking clouds. But if I can't see 100ft in front of me, I sure as hell can't see the nooks and crannies in the clouds. Sort of like this...
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5022/5625787874_f348181ea7_o.jpg

For a lot of the park, the buildings (and the skybox that will be there) will help cover it, but looking out from the bleachers, the ocean is right there so not much on the horizon.

That screenshot looks great btw. And speaking of screenshots, did a first pass at the bleachers. Probably put them through propper.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5030/5625151723_a8f66b2e2b_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5108/5625740844_540b80e5d7_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5226/5625151089_050bbb3194_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5185/5625740298_f4a5b7c8e8_b.jpg

I'll need to reskin the seats but the stock ones were perfect otherwise. I'm also thinking I may "break" some of the lights. Don't like how bright it is, even if that's how it is IRL.

One other oddity I noticed. If you have two func_detail_blocker's intersect, one won't work.

zapwizard

04-16-2011, 03:58 PM

To make the distance lights visible set your max fog density to 0.98 or 0.99.

shotgunefx

04-16-2011, 07:28 PM

To make the distance lights visible set your max fog density to 0.98 or 0.99.

That doesn't work. I may be able to see a bit of the model not in silhouette but the env_sprite glows still disappear. Tried playing with it's End Fade Distance, still no good.

Then it dawned on me.

As I'm looking at these dim lamps, I'm looking at the smokestack 10K units away with a nice big light glow. So I decided to use an env_sprite for close, overlapped with an env_lightglow from far. Took a bit of tweaking, but I like it.

Still not quite perfect, the light glow is too solid for lack of a better word. Wish there was an alpha input for that.
I'll still probably try a particle for it with two children. One for z > X and one for z <= X.

Here's the env_lightglow/sprite combo.

Before sprite fades in...
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/594682957659246909/D23ADADA68A9FE53C943D15F5D5940758110E2F9/

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/594682957659246160/D65D542D67E67043EF1948EE55D46DB37E457A5A/

Also, as far as the field lights, took the backside 3 down to 1 so it doesnt' look so fullbright
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/594682957659248791/459B070CEA1FA5E1B3C8D4B30484B2984B5E0FCE/

shotgunefx

04-17-2011, 05:03 AM

So I did a quick test of a fog "model", to blend out the skybox when the fog is rolling in deep. It's sort of like urban_horizon, just a round alpha faded cylinder model in the skybox, that I manipulate the alpha to make it fade in.

The fade in is done with a mix of vscripts,a trigger_multiple and point_clientcommands so each user should have their own view of the model. It needs some more testing but if all is well, probably could be useful for other things, like manipulating farz on a per client basis depending where in the map they are.

Here's a video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvSXIBU_NR8

shotgunefx

04-18-2011, 11:27 AM

So I wasn't happy with the light glow, I started expirementing with particles. What a PITA without documentation.

I could get it to almost work right. I had used different textures and even added a cloudy one and a little rotatation so it looked like fog illumination, but I kept running into issues getting it to look good near and far.

I think what I would have to do would be to use 2 or 3 for different distances as one system.

The first big issue I hit was that it would not render over the model.
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5309/5631626455_daa1952055_o.jpg
I tried everything, attaching a control point to the player view and rotating it around but no luck.

Then by chance I used a different material and it worked as expected. IIRC it was $additive 1 to make it work right.

But that lead me to look at sprites again. Turns out the issue with them fogging out was as simple as adding $nofog 1 to the vmt

But I kept playing with the particles, trying to get something I liked but kept running into issues like this...
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5066/5631626211_6a209a7cb3_b.jpg

Even though it's only ONE sprite it always render through the world SORT OF. The point in the center is always visible, but often the outer part will be hidden behind the geometry, even though it's all one sprite. I'm guessing it has something to do with the alpha settings. As you can see in this pic, the hotspot of the sprite is clearly visible through the tree trunk, but it's outer glow (and it's all one image) is clearly not.

Here's the sprite version, for now, good enough, I'm not crazy that the glows are all the same size, but I don't won't to get too sidetracked with particles

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5308/5632210126_c74721c626_b.jpg

HellaLouYaah

04-18-2011, 12:15 PM

That last one looks really realistic, maybe the FX amount could go down a tad, but that's cool, good info.

shotgunefx

04-18-2011, 02:27 PM

That last one looks really realistic, maybe the FX amount could go down a tad, but that's cool, good info.

Glad you think so because the sprite one is the easiest. Hard thing with the FX amount is I'm using for 8000 units (the width of the park just about) for both near and far lights. I suppose I could use two sprites, but it's kind of the same problem I have with the particles.

turistas

04-18-2011, 08:11 PM

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4107/4965792582_eb95acf377_z.jpg

i love love love love the look of this photo, if you could event make one part look like this lighting, that be so sick .

shotgunefx

04-19-2011, 12:45 AM

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4107/4965792582_eb95acf377_z.jpg

i love love love love the look of this photo, if you could event make one part look like this lighting, that be so sick .

Me too and that is what I'm aiming for, or at least as close as I can. I think what I'll have to do is make light "models" of the rays like they do for the warehouse windows.

Though at that edge of the park, you won't be able to hardly see across the street. If I let you, then there's another 80 or so houses I'd have to do in decent detail for areas you wont' be able to go to.

shotgunefx

04-19-2011, 12:48 AM

Oh, just noticed in that last batch of screenshots, I compiled with my func_detail blockers off on the pathways. So annyoying, I keep forgetting to enable them again before compile.

turistas

04-20-2011, 03:41 AM

Me too and that is what I'm aiming for, or at least as close as I can. I think what I'll have to do is make light "models" of the rays like they do for the warehouse windows.

Though at that edge of the park, you won't be able to hardly see across the street. If I let you, then there's another 80 or so houses I'd have to do in decent detail for areas you wont' be able to go to.

ok... well keep that lighting in mine... looks so nice... gives that horror feel.

inigmontoya

04-20-2011, 09:05 AM

The bright white lights you're using bug me. It's hard to find a light IRL that are anything close to that pure white.

shotgunefx

04-20-2011, 09:51 AM

The bright white lights you're using bug me. It's hard to find a light IRL that are anything close to that pure white.

Actually, they aren't white, it's a greenish yellow on the lamps in the park and a purple white for the big field lights.

Though I agree they are a bit monochromatic. The lamps in the park definitely need tweaking. Right now, I'm more worried about glow, it's just one func_instance used A LOT, once I figure out what's what, I'll start moving them into the map proper and tweaking them individually.

In those last few screen shots, those are particles I was testing and the env_lightglows which pretty much always look white no matter what the color.

Though speaking of lighting.... ;)

I did a quick test of the "god rays" like in the pics, not terrible. I think with some work it would look really good. The texture definitely needs some work, and looks pretty weird on the side view as it's too opaque but this was more just a proof of concept...

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5310/5637685331_5bc93212a4_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5183/5638260042_ef84440bc4_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5225/5638257992_979183979a_b.jpg

I love this look.
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5107/5637682607_45efcc6661_b.jpg

HellaLouYaah

04-20-2011, 10:25 AM

shotgunefx

04-20-2011, 10:41 AM

The god rays look really good. But, as you said what about the side-on view, it would look odd... I wonder what the compile paramater would be to render them like detail sprites, so they always face the player, solving the possible side-on visual issues.

I think if they were tapered enough (alpha wise), wouldn't be so bad, but you'd probably want to have the cone broken up a bit more as well. Most of the places I've seen them in official campaigns were windows so they don't really have that problem.

Particle effects might be the way to go, because you can set the player view as a control point. Though I don't plan on having these everywhere if I can get it to work, just one or two instances of it.

I don't know if it's possible to have a model that's always oriented to the player but I don't think that would help, I think you would end up with something sprite looking, except it would change a bit when you got close.

The other tricky part is the fog, if you $nofog it, looks way too bright, but if you don't, then you have to be careful about setting fade distances, other wise the light fogs out and looks weird. You can just see the start of it in the first pick, that tiny halo between the sprite glow and the cone.

HellaLouYaah

04-20-2011, 10:50 AM

shotgunefx

04-20-2011, 11:05 AM

Well the 2nd and 3rd pics look almost perfect, maybe a bit of alpha blending like you said. I didn't know you could set the player as the control point for particles, never saw that option. The particle editor is REALLY confusing though, so many options with no explanations.

Yeah, from some angles, even with the crappy test texture it looks great. I actually added a second spot to illuminate where it intersects the ground, but from others, it looks like an orange cone. I think actually making it rays (the cone is never fully illuminated) and varying the angles would help. Maybe I'll try that, random triangular rays coming out in all directions, like a tree model almost.

And yes, the particle editor is very confusing. To parent to a player you need to go to the operators and right click, add function, and I think it's "Set Control Point To Player", and way down in there, there's an option to set the control point number (1,2 etc), which you refer to in your particle system.

So if you spawn along that, it would always oriented towards the player (minus all the other operators you use to make it do something interesting)

My biggest gripe with the particle system though is the keys aren't sorted! So if you copy a particle, and go back and forth to compare values (or crib from another), they are all in different places.

Kind of silly to have "Maximum Alpha" or whatever, and then 50 lines later "Minimum Alpha", and it constantly changes.

The other thing I've surmised, or I *think* I have, normally when they are taking about Maximum, they are taking about NEAR, and Minimum, they are talking about FAR. That's how it seems anyway.

shotgunefx

04-20-2011, 10:29 PM

The bright white lights you're using bug me. It's hard to find a light IRL that are anything close to that pure white.

Hey Inigio, so I went much greener (220 225 174 ) on the lights, but they still come off looking pretty white.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5310/5639303191_9ca7782307_b.jpg

I think that's for two reasons, the grass being green is one. But I also suspect that it's because I'm using light_spots, and I think the hotspot probably tends towards white.

Originally, when I was making the lamps, I was using a plain light, but that caused problems because the light was inside the model, so the model itself would be dark. I know I could add a lighting_origin but that seems like it would create other issues with the model vertex lighting itself, so I looked at The Passing to see how they did it, and cribbed that and after a few parameter tweaks, just cut and pasted it.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5109/5639307875_a397c09ef6_z.jpg

So, for some reason, a light spot doesn't act like it's inside the model, but the lighting also isn't quite right as it's only casting downward. Any thoughts on how I could do this? A lot of those trees should be getting a bit more light at the upper portions. How does everyone else do this with light sources that aren't spots?

The only thing I can think of is adding 3 or 4 ligts around the model top instead of the spot, but not too keen on adding another 100+ lights for vrad to churn. Maybe I'll try and add it to exactly where the light_spot is. Now that I think about it, maybe I had it a tad bit higher which was enough to be "enclosed" in the volume. But I'd love to hear how other people normally do this.

As far as the god rays, I really want them to work , because when they look good, they look good.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5107/5639304837_2451fd0ae1_b.jpg

Where they really look bad is on edge, because when they are on edge, as they are transparent, you're basically seeing multiple polys stacked on top of each other which makes the edges far more opaque than they should be.

So I'm wondering if I can't use a Material Proxy for that. Basically when they are nearer to perpendicular to the view, fade them out much more. So I did a little digging and found this proxy.

PlayerView, which returns the dot product of the player's view angle and the relative origin of the material's entity. I'm wondering if I can't use that to feed the opaqueness of the material. So as you view it on edge, it will mostly disappear.

Keldorn

04-20-2011, 10:55 PM

Originally, when I was making the lamps, I was using a plain light, but that caused problems because the light was inside the model, so the model itself would be dark. I know I could add a lighting_origin but that seems like it would create other issues with the model vertex lighting itself, so I looked at The Passing to see how they did it, and cribbed that and after a few parameter tweaks, just cut and pasted it.

Have you tried compiling with -staticproplighting and -staticproppolys. (but takes forever). The light will not be 'trapped' inside the model when those options are enabled. Since the light bounces using that isn't based of collision models, but the mesh of the model. So long as some of the light or light_spot is outside the model the light will get threw.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5310/5639303191_9ca7782307_b.jpg
^ one of things I hate about source. the tree and lamp have no shadow around the base of them. It looks like their floating in another plane over the ground. Source needs ambient occlusion asap.

shotgunefx

04-20-2011, 11:15 PM

Have you tried compiling with -staticproplighting and -staticproppolys. (but takes forever). The light will not be 'trapped' inside the model when those options are enabled. Since the light bounces using that isn't based of collision models, but the mesh of the model. So long as some of the light or light_spot is outside the model the light will get threw.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5310/5639303191_9ca7782307_b.jpg
^ one of things I hate about source. the tree and lamp have no shadow around the base of them. It looks like their floating in another plane over the ground. Source needs ambient occlusion asap.

Well, that's the thing, if it's outside the model, it doesn't look like it's illuminating right, but the light_spots ARE inside the model. That's how Valve does it.

I tried moving a regular light to the exact same position, and it works better except the lamp top.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5101/5639412519_14c7911109_b.jpg

Maybe I'll try multiple lights. As far as -staticproplighting and -staticproppolys., I always have them turned on.

I know what you mean about the shadowing. Though it doesn't help my lightmap scale on the terrain is WAY low. Has to be. Maps this size, you hit the light hunk errors pretty quickly at 16 luxels. I plan at some point to go back and increase it in areas if I still have the budget for it. Otherwise, maybe I'll just clip some areas where it's more beneficial and turn it up.

shotgunefx

04-23-2011, 02:38 PM

Well have had almost zero time to do anything, but did manage to add the stairs to the upper park.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5183/5647042909_2e4a8b5668_b.jpg

Also, don't know why I couldn't find it before, but found a good reference for tents. http://www.survival-spot.com/survival-blog/temporary-shelters/

I like the first military tents listed, the modular ones. For the moment, I'm just using displacement mockups. Still not sure what the best way to model them is. I suppose I could just clip em up and do most of the shaping in Hammer and them import it into something else to detail and texture them.

But for the interim, going to leave them as the mockups...
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5221/5647605526_77bbbd2e31_b.jpg

Also noticed (by doing the tents), why I had the odd flashlight lighting on the curb sides. I needed to add them to a Hard smoothing group.

HellaLouYaah

04-23-2011, 09:45 PM

zapwizard

04-24-2011, 08:12 AM

For the tents you could make them as a displacement then convert the displacement to a model using propper. Finally using a double sided texture for the inside faces.

You can also find many organic modeling tools in SketchUp, including the regular terrain tool, and export those as a model.

shotgunefx

04-24-2011, 11:22 AM

I'm not sure if you've tried it, but try disabling the lamp shadows and maybe collisions to see if that improves the lighting, that's what I'm doing. Use normal lights though of course, not spot lights. Put the lights right inside the lamp in this case...

About the hard smoothing, the same thing applies to XSI, but it's just called hard edges, without it lighting can be screwy.

I guess I forgot to post about that, what I did was leave the spot in the neck (which causes no light problems), turned it down a bit, and add another regular light right above the model. Works well enough.

I really need to get acquainted with XSI. I played with it in the past, I managed to do some baking and stuff but I still am pretty clueless with it.

For the tents you could make them as a displacement then convert the displacement to a model using propper. Finally using a double sided texture for the inside faces.

You can also find many organic modeling tools in SketchUp, including the regular terrain tool, and export those as a model.

That's sort of what the mockup was, a proof of concept to see how close I could get (quickly) with displacements. I tried TINs once but didnt' like it, but that was with only the built in tools. I'll have to go look at some plugins.

The other thing is I can actually use my curb displacement generator to make displacement models. I could make a real hi res tin of the tent top, and just drape my displacement over it like it was terrain.

Honestly, I think the best thing would be Sculptris, especially with it's curve and pinch tools, very easy to model fabric like things, but what's ridiculously hard is making the basic shape. (A square, etc)

If I could just make a quick rough model like this and import it, I could do it in no time and even bump and texture it, unfortunately it's OBJ import almost never works. I've had it fail on a cube.

Oh and if you get it to work and it sees UVs, it won't let you edit, goes right to paint mode, but most tools I use have a default material and I can never figure out how to strip it out

bklounge23

04-26-2011, 02:21 PM

This is looking amazing! I cant wait to give it a go for real!
Please keep posting pictures of the map :)

shotgunefx

04-26-2011, 02:40 PM

This is looking amazing! I cant wait to give it a go for real!
Please keep posting pictures of the map :)

Thanks man. And on that note, I did a load of a test terrain import just to make sure I wasn't going to have any issues.

I only moved a few buildings into position, so everything else is sunken in the ground. One of the reasons I've not placed many props, would just have to move em

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5224/5659273394_87d9f5713a_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5226/5658699133_9f3b4d4c26_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5270/5659276486_da675261a9_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5263/5658698605_7070825d7e_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5103/5659274708_871aceef0b_b.jpg

lazychaos13

04-26-2011, 04:13 PM

This Map is looking AMAZING!! but a quick question. what kind of map is this gunna be? campaign? survival? scavenge? :)

turistas

04-26-2011, 06:57 PM

if only they can replace cold stream with ur map!...

shotgunefx

04-26-2011, 10:06 PM

This Map is looking AMAZING!! but a quick question. what kind of map is this gunna be? campaign? survival? scavenge? :)
Well a little background, this has been going on (and off) for over a year now, there were a couple restarts as I
A) was new to source and didn't know really what I was doing.
B) I picked a giant project that tries to do all the things that Source does not like (giant, open areas, far view distance, etc).

All of this was lost in the thread deletes, but
I originally started with the end, Castle Island aka Fort Independence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Independence_%28Massachusetts%29) featuring advanced scripted weather and a bit more random than people are used to (like getting killed by lighting, did I mention hordes attract lightning?, multiple rescues, moving trigger_finale, etc), I figured if it was too huge a project and just more than I wanted to take on, I could end it just there as a big survival/scavange map. If it wasn't , I'd continue from the start and work my way there for a five (or six!) map campaign

Here's is an ancient picture, really need to reupload all the photos (there's also a bunch of videos on youtube)
http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/leeland_2147_107668229.jpg

Mapping of real places (especially the island) was a pain. Had to build a lot of tools for doing the geolocation stuff like terrain displacements (laying walks on displacements, etc), but in the end, still the data I was pulling from Google Earth was way too low res, then started investigating buying better satellite data or publicly available, still too low, then I bought a good GPS with alimteter and started actually making a topographical map of the island, then Sketchup 8 came out with much better geo location data (much higher res), and that's when things got the third reboot. There was also a lot of other stuff that came up too in the learning process.

But from that experience and the tools I've made along the way, it's much less painful now. I knocked out all those pathway displacements in the park in an hour or two, the original go on the Island, I spent about four weeks height adjusting and sculpting the mile of walkways that flow all over it and it still looked terrible. Now I can edit > generate that in the time it takes to watch Archer lol and it all just comes out looking pretty great.

So going much faster this time, for all these updates you see, I'm not actually investing that much time (because of work atm). Once things settle down, the pace should start really picking up

if only they can replace cold stream with ur map!...

Lol thank, well, let's wait until it's finished and shipped, but definitely going much faster this go-round.

edit And if I have my druther's there will still be a shark ;)
http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/leeland_2147_9670812.jpg

lazychaos13

04-27-2011, 05:01 AM

Well a little background, this has been going on (and off) for over a year now, there were a couple restarts as I
A) was new to source and didn't know really what I was doing.
B) I picked a giant project that tries to do all the things that Source does not like (giant, open areas, far view distance, etc).

All of this was lost in the thread deletes, but
I originally started with the end, Castle Island aka Fort Independence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Independence_%28Massachusetts%29) featuring advanced scripted weather and a bit more random than people are used to (like getting killed by lighting, did I mention hordes attract lightning?, multiple rescues, moving trigger_finale, etc), I figured if it was too huge a project and just more than I wanted to take on, I could end it just there as a big survival/scavange map. If it wasn't , I'd continue from the start and work my way there for a five (or six!) map campaign

Here's is an ancient picture, really need to reupload all the photos (there's also a bunch of videos on youtube)
http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/leeland_2147_107668229.jpg

Mapping of real places (especially the island) was a pain. Had to build a lot of tools for doing the geolocation stuff like terrain displacements (laying walks on displacements, etc), but in the end, still the data I was pulling from Google Earth was way too low res, then started investigating buying better satellite data or publicly available, still too low, then I bought a good GPS with alimteter and started actually making a topographical map of the island, then Sketchup 8 came out with much better geo location data (much higher res), and that's when things got the third reboot. There was also a lot of other stuff that came up too in the learning process.

But from that experience and the tools I've made along the way, it's much less painful now. I knocked out all those pathway displacements in the park in an hour or two, the original go on the Island, I spent about four weeks height adjusting and sculpting the mile of walkways that flow all over it and it still looked terrible. Now I can edit > generate that in the time it takes to watch Archer lol and it all just comes out looking pretty great.

So going much faster this time, for all these updates you see, I'm not actually investing that much time (because of work atm). Once things settle down, the pace should start really picking up

Lol thank, well, let's wait until it's finished and shipped, but definitely going much faster this go-round.

edit And if I have my druther's there will still be a shark ;)
http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/leeland_2147_9670812.jpg

Oh awesome mate :) this is one of the best looking maps i have personally seen. Alot of people could learn alot from you!

AjBastian27

04-30-2011, 05:28 PM

what u been up to dog??

shotgunefx

04-30-2011, 06:58 PM

what u been up to dog??

Not much, been way too busy at work. So pretty much just going back and doing little detail stuff when I have time, stuff I can start and stop with no penalty. At the moment, I'm adding the interior of the bus repair facility. So glad that all the models I need for the lifts are already included. I'm actually getting excited about the depot. I think it's going to be a pretty cool space once it's done. No pics yet though.

Though on another note, saw something the other night that I've never seen. The garage next to the bar, I've never seen that open, or lit or anything in my entire life. Well, apparently the owner died a while back and someone bought it and left the lights on. Presumably will be razed soon and more condos. The interior is just as decrepit as the outside so I may do the interior now.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5028/5662871388_0b80e0a027_z.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5148/5662866316_1522a59055_z.jpg

Actually some of the stuff you'll see in the final maps will be stuff removed in the last ten years. This town is getting gentrified so fast, a good chance most of all the industrial stuff you see so far will be gone in the next ten years, even the power plant to make way for hundreds of units of yuppie housing.

Literally most of the churches and schools here (and there were a lot) have either been made into million dollar condos or raised and replaced with them. So part of what I'm trying to do is capture the town as it still is and a bit of what it was.

Keldorn

05-01-2011, 06:50 PM

This town is getting gentrified so fast, a good chance most of all the industrial stuff you see so far will be gone in the next ten years, even the power plant to make way for hundreds of units of yuppie housing.

If you asked me what Gentrification was 3 weeks ago I wouldn't beable to tell you. But I found out what isand its really making it a pain for me to get get good photos of the old new york city.

1988
http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk210/dtoronto2008/u1994.jpg
2007
http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk210/dtoronto2008/u2007.jpg
The difference is noticable..
But the first one is better for a zombie apocalypse environment. :P

shotgunefx

05-01-2011, 10:39 PM

If you asked me what Gentrification was 3 weeks ago I wouldn't beable to tell you. But I found out what isand its really making it a pain for me to get get good photos of the old new york city.

1988
http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk210/dtoronto2008/u1994.jpg
2007
http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk210/dtoronto2008/u2007.jpg
The difference is noticable..
But the first one is better for a zombie apocalypse environment. :P

The second one looks like a better place to walk at night, but the first certainly looks like a much better map lol. Even some of the stuff I took pictures of at the beginning of this for reference have already been knocked down.

Here's a couple interior pics of the bus terminal, still pretty bare. Hard to fill up. I'm going to need to make a bunch of props. Also never noticed before the buses don't have any texture on the bottom so I'll have to work on that.

I think on the other half of the building, I may make one of those lifts an event, like hold off the horde until the bus is lifted and you can make it under.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5107/5678985834_e0474211da_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5226/5678986000_fd6ccd5dae_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5023/5678986492_e66b6403d3_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5303/5678986650_30cc9d10ea_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5021/5678426187_e526fde292_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5223/5678987056_72cdc85fe5_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5189/5678987342_757095655b_b.jpg

Seem to be getting a lot of weird overlay stuff. Like flashlight interactions or even just flickering.
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5147/5678987798_69e9b1d6d3_b.jpg

shotgunefx

05-02-2011, 08:20 AM

Still pretty bare, but coming along.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inNZ-YZakYk

Weird, I find when I have to guess stuff, it takes WAY longer. Just the time spent thinking what would make sense here? Right inside the depot I can see, and I can see the lifts, but everything else is pretty much guessing. It's pretty impressive they can maneuver around in there at all, especially when they sometimes need to make 3 point turns to fit through the bay.

shotgunefx

05-03-2011, 07:24 AM

So jarateed off.

So I'm working on the rear of the depot working on the lift event area, and just trying out different scenarios to make the scene look somewhat natural and it happens.

I added a curved wall and the dreaded "Host_EndGame: Map coordinate extents are too large!! Check for errors! " started to appear.

I HATE THIS message. For the uninitiated, it means maybe you're map is out of bounds, or maybe not, maybe it's something stupid like an invalid brush, but when this happens, the second you attempt to load your map, your navigation is wrecked. It marks it somehow in the nav, so when you fix the error, it still won't load.

So what happens for most people (myself included the first time I hit it), is you remove your most recent changes, not fix, ok, what did you do before? And so on and so on. You end up taking a machete to your map and hacking pieces out trying to recover it but you never do because it's not the map, it's the nav, even though you didn't edit your nav. I spent a couple weeks on it the first time it bit me.

Just REALLY annoying, I guess I'll try renaming the nav and seeing if I can import it.

Oh, and the funny thing is, that curved wall? I cut and paste it back into the map in the same place (using paste in place), works fine if I func detail each piece individually instead of selecting them all and CTRL-T. So annoyed.

Xopaa

05-03-2011, 08:15 AM

zapwizard

05-03-2011, 08:20 AM

The nav is typically backed up in the maps folder, mind generates like 12 copies. Do one of those work?
I also personally don't do any nav until I determine my map is 100% geometry complete.

On the flickering overlays, there are a lot of textures mis-marked as overlays that actually aren't. For example I am pretty sure that puddle in your last image is actually placed as a prop_static.\

On some of the interior shots, the lighting on the floor looks very even, especially in the bathrooms. This makes them feel a bit flat. I would recommend either some trim along the bottom edge of the walls, or pull the lighting in a bit so the corners darken a little.

shotgunefx

05-03-2011, 10:20 AM

curved wall might be a candidate for a displacement brush.

if you go into the map folder and delete all the nav files will it fix it? wonderin cause ive had this happen too. sounds extreme but usually the worst part of nav is getting it to work, once you know what the maps issues were it pretty easy to slap it back out.

also was lookin at the screens above, and the bathroom tiles look great, but turn down the spec/glossiness a bit. although it could just be tonemap settings, etc.

keep up the good work, this thing is gonna be epic.

Deleting the nav (or renaming the bsp) fixes it, but it's still a PITA. I mostly mention it for posterity as the old thread I had about it got deleted (and to vent). Because it makes it sound like a vmf problem, it's very frustrating. It caused more than one restart with the castle way back when. IRRC, I spent god knows how long, removing brushes trying to find it the first time. I think I cut the entire map (which was huge) through trial and error down to a single square brush before it dawned on me it wasn't the map even though it says it is.

As far as rebuilding the nav, it's a bit of a pita for a few reasons. I like to build the nav as I go because some of the map movement, I'm not sure how some of it's going to go and being able to actually play through helps figure that out. In general the nav isn't too bad except making all the roofs no mob, but the firescapes are a real pain to get right as well as the marking off the fences as it keeps spawning things on the park fences like birds on a wire. Things of that nature.

As far as the gloss, I agree (though don't mind the wet look in the mens room so much). I'm having a few issues with gloss that I need to track down. Like the utility cart towards the bathroom, if you notice in the video, with no light on it at all, it's silver, until part of your light hits it and it looks red, same with the microwave. I don't even have a tonemap controller yet or color correction. That's on the stuff to do later as while I've played with them, I'm not all that familar with them.

I think if I can actually finish it, it might be alright. I'm liking the bus event. Basically what I've come down to for the second half of the compound is a roof collapse (due to a chopper crash or similar), and the only way to get out is the vehicle lifts, you'll have to raise each of the three buses, one at a time, before walking or crawling under them to raise the next. And you have to keep pressing it to keep it moving upwards (thought it won't move back down). Of course starting to raise each bus will trigger a panic. And of course the debris will be angled so that the commons can get over it from the other side, and they'll be able to attack you from behind, and from the holes in the roof from above, so basically all directions. Basically a big pit of hell. I tried some other configurations but every other way of artificially forcing you to walk under just seem contrived and unnatural.

The nav is typically backed up in the maps folder, mind generates like 12 copies. Do one of those work?
I also personally don't do any nav until I determine my map is 100% geometry complete.

On the flickering overlays, there are a lot of textures mis-marked as overlays that actually aren't. For example I am pretty sure that puddle in your last image is actually placed as a prop_static.\

On some of the interior shots, the lighting on the floor looks very even, especially in the bathrooms. This makes them feel a bit flat. I would recommend either some trim along the bottom edge of the walls, or pull the lighting in a bit so the corners darken a little.

I'm gonna try one of the backups, (plus I have my own), just annoying. Thanks for the heads up on the flickering overlays, I didn't know that.. I just ditched the problematic ones rather than fight with them right now.

You're right about the trim. As far as the lighting itself, most of it is doing a lot of Cut & Paste, sort of stab and refine.

Also weird lighting on the stall doors. The outside looks fine, but the inside is always shaded like it's closed. Looks weird.I even added a bit of regular light under the light so the ceiling wouldn't be so black and hopefully help with the doors, though not sure how I feel about it, plus it didn't help the door issue at all.

As far as the nav, like I said above, I mean, some of it I know what I want to happen exactly, and other areas I'm sort of trying to carve the function into the form (while trying to make it look the other way around).

shotgunefx

05-05-2011, 09:42 AM

So started working on the "roof" collapse event. Keep in mind, very rough, more playing with the shapes and what not, more a proof of concept. Just wanted to get a feel if I could use what was there for roof to contain the survivors to where I want them while giving a lot of paths for the infected (and not be exploitable) and not looking too contrived.

I will say I find modeling this type of stuff a bit challenging in hammer. I think once I could the final feel as far as roughing it out, I may go back and do it in something else. Maybe even Sketchup using my displacement tools as all they pretty much do is drape displacements over geometry. I very well might end up going with converting the roof and parts into mdls.

Anyways, here's the rough idea...
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5230/5690842794_5aa48f4731_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5107/5688244243_0fd3b06fb8_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5027/5688816362_8c742fbc82_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5027/5688816676_9b6e299c94_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5185/5688813720_3cbc34142c_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5141/5688817138_d1b3109054_b.jpg

Also did some other random additions...
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5185/5688815238_f02d64ac24_b.jpg

I definitely am not groking something about how visibility is being calculated. I'm getting way too much overdraw. I understand in the open areas why it happens (no splits, so the leafs are very tall, but this I do not get at all.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5301/5688814668_85d222ae3e_z.jpg

I split the area I'm standing in at the roof (as the leaf was the default height for unbroken areas (512?) So if I'm on the top plane of this portal, maybe it's possible I could see the top of those houses, maybe, but there is no way I could see the lower stories, yet it thinks it can obviously. There are a ton of solids in between (notice it's not rendering anything in the bus terminal in between (which is correct). Definitely think this is something I should tackle sooner, rather than later.

In reality, it will be less of a problem because I won't have this ridiculous farz and the skybox will be built, but I'd still like to know what I'm missing.

zapwizard

05-06-2011, 08:32 AM

shotgunefx

05-06-2011, 09:14 AM

Try using a hint brush to virtually cap off the leafs so they aren't so tall.
The game will render what is in the leaf if you can see any portion of the leaf, such as the top edge of a tall leaf.

You can view the visleaves inside of hammer by doing the Load Portals command. That can help you sculpt them using hints and world brushes.

My Seaholm map is VERY open, so I am pretty much treating my visual development the same as the Unreal engine does, most the map is models with faded rendering distances. Only models and walls important to visibility or silhouetting the skybox are kept rendered.

I actually did that (the horizontal hints in the open area), and I re-read some of the optimization guides like ten times and think I have a pretty good feel for it now, but it still doesn't work.

It's strange, I tried to take all the rooms in the bus station and corner hint them, they are perfect for it, door on the left, all props to the right, can only see from a small range of the garage, which SHOULD work, but it doesn't.

Something, somewhere in my map, is cutting vvis 8 units before those front rooms, breaking the hint. The hint still cuts vis, but after that other cut, ruining it. I hid EVERYTHING with 4000 units of it and still can't find what's causing that split. Very frustrating.

My understanding are hints should go first, but they are not. I even took the bus terminal and enclosed every single wall (floor and ceiling too) with a hint, still cut right through.

I have a feeling it has to do with how it selects the first split. I haven't read Carmack's paper since he wrote it and published it in Dr Dobbs, many many years ago (pre HL1), but my understanding is a big part of BSP, and it's efficiency is the root split. And the root split can drastically affect the balance and performance of your tree, because it determines how many, or how few splits the world will require and the balance of what is in front of the split and what is behind. Also it's somewhat hard to determine an optimal root split.

I've often wondered how Source determines that. Judging that this mystery split is at Y=0, I'm suspecting it starts at the origin.

I've gathered from the castle and what not that most of what's going to save me is farz and the skybox. But I'd like to do what I can otherwise. As it stands, almost as soon as the portal opens to the bus station, all the rooms and props towards the front are being rendered.

So for the moment, I removed ALL of the temporary geometry (curbs, roads, whatnot). The wip screenshots will look like they've stepped back a little, but it will just make everything easier.

zapwizard

05-06-2011, 12:56 PM

Keldorn

05-06-2011, 03:20 PM

cutting across the air with hints doesn't work 100%. The engine still overdraws for some reason. Maby its to avoid stuff poping in and out of existence in a noticable way and seeing split second HOM effects.

Here is example of what I mean done using water.
Create 2 rooms with a door inbetween, and one filled with water and a brush halfway threw the door (for the water to hug against) (the water in room should be high enough so your head is almost submerged in it). When you jump up and down the stuff will disappear and pop into existence from the bottom half of the other room. Whats going on here? I think the game is respecting the visleafs completely, because technically the visleaf that the water creates cannot see the bottom visleaf from the other room.

To save the trouble of making this, Here is such a room already created as .vmf you can compile and test it out.
http://www.filesend.net/download.php?f=e952cf2f666512c79c2b96dd7edbf826

My Seaholm map is VERY open, so I am pretty much treating my visual development the same as the Unreal engine does, most the map is models with faded rendering distances. Only models and walls important to visibility or silhouetting the skybox are kept rendered.

I find this a great optimization although I wouldn't go as far to turn whole buildings into models because they will look terrible, because of the vertex lighting. Now turning any func_detail that is repeated more then once into a model you can take advantage of the gpu caching that mesh and making it cheaper to render. Actually I think your one who was talking about func_details into models with propper in another thread.

Something, somewhere in my map, is cutting vvis 8 units before those front rooms, breaking the hint. The hint still cuts vis, but after that other cut, ruining it. I hid EVERYTHING with 4000 units of it and still can't find what's causing that split. Very frustrating.

It could be a cut in a brush doing it. Take a wall and just cut it 3 or 4 times in different angles. But have them all on the same plane, don't move them or anything. Vbsp will creates viscuts at those spots. You can get rid of them by placing a hint directly over the brushes. Its common place to just wrap an entire building with a hint brush like this with all the brush cuts that make up the building to mimizie the visleafs cuts. It doesn't work 100% of the time. For those cluster♥♥♥♥ ones you can't get rid of, use a func_viscluter around it. :p

shotgunefx

05-06-2011, 04:17 PM

The "root split" vis leaves are cut along the 512x512 grid. (The brown lines inside of hammer)

If what you think should be a single whole visleaf overlaps one of those lines, it will get cut along those lines irregardless of what is technically optimal for the room.

BSP basically starts at those 512x512 blocks and move though the tree for what is inside those blocks. This is why sometimes you are actually better off with letting the game render the whole area rather then wasting time trying to perfectly optimize lots of vis-leafs. The game may waste just as much CPU time calculating those render trees as it would actually rendering them. It's all a balancing game.

Thanks for that explanation.

I guess because it's named BSP and based on DOOM, (and a lot of technical stuff I read on it back in the day) that I was so confused.

I mean, the whole portal thing is not really anything like a binary space partitioning tree. BSP is splitting the world on a plane (wall) and taking those two subspaces and splitting those resulting subspaces into two and so on and so on until each leaf has no children.

That way you can quickly walk down the tree rejecting whole branches (this node is behind me, therefor none of it's children can be seen, I'm looking at the front of this wall, so nothing behind it can be seen,etc).

And I knew that it split open space every 512 (though I thought it was 1024), but what I didn't know was that it will split everything on those boundaries even when there is geometry there.

Now it all makes more sense. I don't plan on going nuts with optimization because it's largely impossible, unless I close most of the roofs which I don't intend to do. But it'd like to optimize interiors where possible. If you can't see those 20 models inside those rooms when you're outside, it's 20 models I can have when you are.

One of the first concessions I made on this go-round was that I wouldn't stagger the house fronts (or not often), slightly less accurate but with the height differences and the swelling terrain, I figured it will still look a lot more natural and less flat.

So now that I know it'll do those splits, I'll just try and keep the building fronts on 512 boundaries. that way I shouldn't run into this issue so much. Right now, it just means moving what I have 16 units, so I can easily match it in my skp file.

cutting across the air with hints doesn't work 100%. The engine still overdraws for some reason. Maby its to avoid stuff poping in and out of existence in a noticable way and seeing split second HOM effects.

Here is example of what I mean done using water.
Create 2 rooms with a door inbetween, and one filled with water and a brush halfway threw the door (for the water to hug against) (the water in room should be high enough so your head is almost submerged in it). When you jump up and down the stuff will disappear and pop into existence from the bottom half of the other room. Whats going on here? I think the game is respecting the visleafs completely, because technically the visleaf that the water creates cannot see the bottom visleaf from the other room.

To save the trouble of making this, Here is such a room already created as .vmf you can compile and test it out.
http://www.filesend.net/download.php?f=e952cf2f666512c79c2b96dd7edbf826

I find this a great optimization although I wouldn't go as far to turn whole buildings into models because they will look terrible, because of the vertex lighting. Now turning any func_detail that is repeated more then once into a model you can take advantage of the gpu caching that mesh and making it cheaper to render. Actually I think your one who was talking about func_details into models with propper in another thread.

I'll give that vmf a try.

Actually, right now, one of my buildings is almost entirely model. Doesn't look so bad. I wouldn't recommend it normally but this particular building would just be too expensive in the brush count department to look decent because of the arches.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5224/5600238275_2320cf9b51_b.jpg

HellaLouYaah

05-06-2011, 11:40 PM

Keldorn

05-07-2011, 04:29 AM

I guess that building doesn't look that bad as models. From a distance anyways.

I actually find that areaportalwindow often hurt the framerate more then they help. It has an extra overhead to cacluate when it should be open or not. Its ok if you have only 1 entrance, a door or window. But if you got like 3 windows open and a door. Its going to hurt the framerate more then it'll help.
The worst case scenario is if you have a street with multiple buildings and each one has interiors with multiple entraces all with areaportalwindows. The framerate is going to bomb.

HellaLouYaah

05-07-2011, 08:41 AM

I don't think so though, I think the benefits outway the costs. As in the case you stated, you should just be using the least amount. So, for say a long row of separate windows, just use one areaportalwindow for the whole row. Since Valve uses them a lot, I think they are probably a good thing.

Areaportals work decently in that case too, so say around a corner the inside of the stores couldn't be seen.

shotgunefx

05-07-2011, 07:21 PM

This is getting really technical, lol. Why not just use areaportalwindows for building entrances/exits/windows, and use the farzclip option to a value of ~5000? Then for the skybox, convert the major buildings into a prop/func_details with a black texture and put in the 3dskybox.

I mean it is 2011, people should have decent enough computers to handle a decently optimized source engine map. My current maps are fairly open, and they seem to work, although fade distances on models are helping too.

Well farz and skyboxing is a given, And while I'm not looking to go nuts with optimization, if there's another 10-20% on the table I can easily squeeze out of it, I don't mind taking it. As a for instance, the greyhound is going to have quite a bit more than it already does, and if I can hide that, longer, that means all the more I can jam outside of it.

And actually appreciate the relatively meager requirements of Source games. If it wasn't for that, never would have even played l4d. I hadn't pc gamed in ages. Once I started playing I bumped up my hardware, but if I hadn't been able to run it somewhat decently, never would have bothered.

I guess that building doesn't look that bad as models. From a distance anyways.

I actually find that areaportalwindow often hurt the framerate more then they help. It has an extra overhead to cacluate when it should be open or not. Its ok if you have only 1 entrance, a door or window. But if you got like 3 windows open and a door. Its going to hurt the framerate more then it'll help.
The worst case scenario is if you have a street with multiple buildings and each one has interiors with multiple entraces all with areaportalwindows. The framerate is going to bomb.

Well, it looks decent enough, though lighting is tricky, but still looks better than the all brush version by far.

I suppose with portals, it's like anything else, cost vs benefit, but for how I'm using them now, definitely benefit. And yeah, if you're having multiple windows, you definitely want to just use one portal.

One random bug I found with areaportal windows, if you use multiple bmodels that share an entity name (say one portal covering 3 windows, and you have 3 separate models named portal_winmodel), only one gets enabled at map start. You need to use a logic auto to turn them on when the map or round starts.

I don't think so though, I think the benefits outway the costs. As in the case you stated, you should just be using the least amount. So, for say a long row of separate windows, just use one areaportalwindow for the whole row. Since Valve uses them a lot, I think they are probably a good thing.

Areaportals work decently in that case too, so say around a corner the inside of the stores couldn't be seen.

Valve certainly seems found of them.

HellaLouYaah

05-07-2011, 08:17 PM

The weirdest thing about it all is, my friend uses a crappy 4 year old acer laptop for l4d2, and he can still play just about any map, custom ones too(probably not very optimized). Though, I personally couldn't stand the resolutions and detail levels he plays the game at.

shotgunefx

05-08-2011, 02:22 PM

So I've been cleaning up and doing a little bit of experimenting. First of all, one of the issue I had was somehow, a good deal of my func_details got turned into world geometry which is one of the reasons things seemed to be going downhill. Probably copying and pasting or something.

So I fixed that and cleaned up the skybox, did a couple tweaks. Not only did that restore the fps I was seeing, it of course cut vvis down to nothing. Before things seemed wonky, it was probably taking six minutes, after those details became geometry, was taking near 30 mins, but having fixed that, and cleaned up, it's back at 2 mins, yay!

So as far as actually doing something with hints to improve the map...

I can't really cut at the rooftops, because they are all different heights, so I figured I'd cut across the whole map below the lowest roof but higher than a survivor would be in his travels (standing on a car, etc).

In the trouble spots (open areas), went from 90fps to 157fps. So that's quite a nice boost for such little effort.

shotgunefx

05-09-2011, 03:51 PM

So started working on the interior of the barn building (Shaugnessy Crane).

I think it looks ok, still not sure I'm happy with the interior. It's still bare, but I mean in general. Don't have any real sense of how the interior is set up. I imagine there's a second floor, but I wonder if it's more on just the eaves. Anyway, need to think about what type of event I want here and build out accordingly.

The window models are temps. I'm going to modify them and dirty em up while I'm at it, way too clean for that building.

Also odd to note, not sure how I want to light it, so I played with some different scenarios. I thought lighting it from outside would be interesting, but the light doesn't actually seem to pass through the window models.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2692/5705194162_73a9385a69_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3324/5705194330_1884bb447c_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2381/5705194778_28ff79696f_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3342/5705194986_48c784feae_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3108/5704628717_d41f073955_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2443/5704629063_0c935fecda_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2036/5705196256_af3e7056b3_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2289/5705196660_73ee4436b0_b.jpg

HellaLouYaah

05-09-2011, 04:06 PM

shotgunefx

05-09-2011, 04:13 PM

I was wondering, what kind of lights do you use mostly? I'm guessing spot lights, but are they set to constant, linear or quadratic?

Also, what are the distances you use on average. I find that using constant with a large radius works well like Valve does it, but would that impact performance very much if there are many of them. For example, street lights are set to 20000 units, and a regular 60 watt light is ~2048.

Normally I use spots, set to quadratic. Sometimes I will add a very weak regular light near the base to add a bit of light around the area (but not in this building).

Why would constant impact performance? I mean, it's going to have the same luxels regardless, correct? Or do you mean compile time?

I'm up for any lighting tips. I guess I should look through the official maps some more, never noticed their use of constant.

Keldorn

05-09-2011, 04:27 PM

HellaLouYaah

05-09-2011, 04:37 PM

shotgunefx

05-09-2011, 04:48 PM

It took me a long time to figure out the lights, for example I never knew the last digit on the RGB actually controlled the brightness until like a year into using source. (It was pretty obscure.)Still not sure what constant does. I think its makes light overpower other lights. Like if you use a light outside in a daytime environment, you may not see it. So if you put a big constant like 50000, it will become visible. So its like another way to control brightness.

Well I had an idea of what those did, but was totally wrong on how they are actually set in Hammer. I thought that those were like bit flags (quadratic,constant,linear), and wondered more than once why they each had a key value (as opposed to being one setting with multiple values)

Basically it's all how fall off is calculated. Constant just has no fall off whatsoever.

So if it illuminates something 100ft away, it will be just as bright as it is if it were 1 ft away. I believe the police car instance uses constant for the headlights.

Your lights look good as they are, was just wondering, because if you look at the motel lights on c1m1 or whatever, they are set to constant with a 20000 radius. The light looks surprisingly realistic considering it's not quadratic. But, I guess the downside is that the radius affects compile times, unless obscured by walls or something.

Actually that is something I've found really challenging in general. The quadratic lights just fall off way too fast compared to real life, maybe it's just how they model radiosity but it seems like not enough life ends up bouncing back into the environment and the lights themselves always seem too hot at the source. For instance, I like the outside floods, but the upper deck of the warehouse just seems way too dark.

This article was helpful, but still not the most intuitive

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Constant-Linear-Quadratic_Falloff

Guess I'll have to do some more experimenting.

Acermors

05-09-2011, 07:13 PM

It's only easy to get a handle on what Quadratic/Linear/Constant do if you mess with them. :) I actually did a test map at one point just to test this. According to the wiki, it sounds like the values are supposed to range from 0 to 1, but Valve loves putting in values like 2000. I don't know what the point of that is, but the difference between the three is very noticeable.

Quadratic is what you see mostly in Valve maps. It doesn't spread light very far, and the light is very intense at its origin until you look at it long enough, at which point it fades off towards linear's brightness (in HDR anyway).
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6660/acerlightingtest0005.jpg

Linear is more realistic, in some cases, IMO. It spreads light and illuminates areas better.
http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/3755/acerlightingtest0003.jpg

Constant is what shotgun said. Makes for overly bright lighting and isn't terribly useful except in special cases. Here it looks almost like the map is full bright.
http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/2807/acerlightingtest0004.jpg

Take what I said here with a grain of salt though, since I only tested lights and not light_spots. All of the above images have the same number of lights, all of which have the same settings except for Quadratic/Linear/Constant.

shotgunefx

05-09-2011, 07:15 PM

Your lights look good as they are, was just wondering, because if you look at the motel lights on c1m1 or whatever, they are set to constant with a 20000 radius. The light looks surprisingly realistic considering it's not quadratic. But, I guess the downside is that the radius affects compile times, unless obscured by walls or something.

So reading that through a couple times, looks like those numbers are just rations between the attenuation. so constant 20000, quadratic 1, linear 0

is 20K:0:1

Though in practice, not sure how they figure...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2606/5705202025_db7d46363e_b.jpg

In the pic above, the right light is constant 20k, quad 1, as you can see, no hot spot whatso ever.

Moving to the left, it's 1000:1, the next 500:1, and the leftmost, is just quadratic.

Either way, it seems that constant has to be quite a bit greater than linear to be noticable, at least at close distances

Keldorn

05-10-2011, 07:53 AM

shotgunefx

05-10-2011, 08:03 AM

I was tinkering with the constant variable yesterday night

I noticed a glitch with Constant. I set a light_spot to 25000 car light source but the light starting going threw walls into a room that was dark. (no the wall is not func_detail). I would say if you ever get that problem with light coming threw walls and you can't stop it. You know what the glitch is now. Thought I would let you know.

I also noticed that the with Show 3D helpers , the "cone" from a light_spot gets longer as you increase the constant. Unsure what that implicates.

When you were setting up your light_spot, were the other two (linear and quadratic) set to zero?

Speaking of buggyiness. Lot's of fun playing with -textureshadows. It's very particular about alphas. Most of the fence models, if you put them in a rad file do not work at all.

zapwizard

05-10-2011, 02:14 PM

Some fence models use a single face with a double-side texture. Those type don't work with the textureshadows (that I know of).

Other fences use a nicer alpha texture and two faces (one in each direction)
Those do work on textureshadows when their texture or model is added to the RAD file.
For those interested in texture shadows see here for a tutorial:
http://www.interlopers.net/tutorials/27738
And see my WOLD winner for examples of what kind of boost in shadow detail it provides: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5298/5559884845_3c8464afcf_o.jpg

shotgunefx

05-10-2011, 02:37 PM

Some fence models use a single face with a double-side texture. Those type don't work with the textureshadows (that I know of).

Other fences use a nicer alpha texture and two faces (one in each direction)
Those do work on textureshadows when their texture or model is added to the RAD file.

That was the tutorial I was using. Also wouldn't work with my window model, seems like semi opaque is opaque.

For those interested in texture shadows see here for a tutorial:
http://www.interlopers.net/tutorials/27738
And see my WOLD winner for examples of what kind of boost in shadow detail it provides: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5298/5559884845_3c8464afcf_o.jpg

That looks ****ing great!

shotgunefx

05-10-2011, 03:38 PM

So what got me looking into texture shadows in the first place were the windows, thought it might be cool to light the warehouse, with all it's windows from the outside by generator light, or fire, or both. So instead of redoing the model, just made it an instance and approximated it with blocklos brushes.

Fire only
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3600/5708531560_defef1d164_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3202/5708531062_99a7ca393d_b.jpg

With a spot...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2114/5708583724_4bd55eb9a6_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2189/5708584078_4266a8e165_b.jpg

Think I'll go with something along the lines of the second.

Oh, Keldorn, getting that leakage issue you mentioned with the constant lights.

Another odd thing, the bus event, everything works fine EXCEPT it doesn't trigger a panic event. I'm thinking because they are in instances, it's changing the director name. Guess I could write a script for it, but seems silly to have to.

shotgunefx

05-10-2011, 06:23 PM

Little bit of a change up, so I was cleaning up some stuff in the bus depot, and it occurred to me to make a displacement girder so I could just bend them to fit the scene, then after, I could just pop them out to propper as a model if I want.

Didn't come out too bad, texs are a bit stretched (but easily fixed in khed or similar), though one problem is if you bend em too much, you get a physics error. Haven't tried making them not solid to see if it still happens. I'm guessing propper will choke too...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2521/5708931580_d6a9a7f6b1_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2257/5708931922_e13a5af1b8_b.jpg

shotgunefx

05-11-2011, 11:39 AM

So the warehouse is coming along. I've got an idea of what the event will be.

You'll need to make your way towards the rear and drop in through a window.

The windows are high enough to be a one way drop, though a few will have some props outside them to let the commons enter. You make your way to the front and open the garage door which triggers an event. Right now, you just hit the bottom and on they come. I'll probably change that. One, I may make you have to hold the button like the bus lifts, or I may make power go out (or some combo of the two)

I still need to add a ton of stuff to the interior, but more or less, lighting, etc will be similar to what you see here.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3123/5710269599_52344d38b9_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3562/5710833102_a1785ef483_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3483/5710833278_4b5b37d595_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2797/5710270923_365c498eb5_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2019/5710833724_cf94244d7a_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3198/5710271657_aef9031636_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3033/5710271855_05a6b2877f_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3274/5710839768_24f55c991f_b.jpg

zapwizard

05-11-2011, 11:47 AM

AjBastian27

05-11-2011, 11:59 AM

I'm kinda confused. Are u making multiple levels? Or is this just one large level with multiple crescendos?? Are u making a campaign or just 1 big map?

shotgunefx

05-11-2011, 12:01 PM

I really like the lighting inside the warehouse.
The warehouse seems like it could use a ramp or be lower to the ground, as most of that style aren't built higher then the surround area, such that vehicles can drive straight in.

Thanks. It's a bit dramatic but I like it. Especially the hordes popping in and out of shadow.

As far as the ground, that's just the temp terrain. Everything is going to be built on solid ground, then transferred to the displacement geometry.

When I started cleaning up to fix those issues that were creeping in, I ditched all of the temp terrain and moved all houses to a fixed plane, leaving a bit of foundation to drag to meet the "floor" of the world in the final geometry. You'll notice on other buildings, everything is floating above the ground plane now.

While the ground is somewhat flat in this area, the back is probably 7ft or so lower than the the front.

shotgunefx

05-11-2011, 12:34 PM

I'm kinda confused. Are u making multiple levels? Or is this just one large level with multiple crescendos?? Are u making a campaign or just 1 big map?

I don't blame you. It's going to be a five (or six!) map campaign. A lot of the other areas were in the old thread that was deleted.

What you're looking at is actually the middle of two levels(building outwards). The bar (Murphys Law) is the safe room. There will be an obstruction that prevents you from walking past the bar (possible a collapse of one of the smoke stacks).

The 2nd (or third) level has you coming up first street (all the industrial stuff) towards to the bar via the bus terminal and barn events.

You won't be able to pass the street due to an obstruction (probably a bus as it's convenient and realistic). You'll then have to randomly either

A) go through the bus terminal and out to the bar through the yard via the lift event

B) the bus terminal will be closed, but you'll be able to get into those fenced off yards, fight your way to the back of the warehouse and through the warehouse event, and out the front to the backdoor of the bar

or
C) I leave both routes and let you pick.

A few goals I'm trying to meet. Outside of forcing flow for play, I'm trying to have 2 or 3 paths at all times. When I do force flow for play, I want to have at least 2 options whenever possible (instead of ohh one path is different). Both to increase replay, but honestly more so that I can fit more of the neighborhood in the map.

As far as the campaign flow, the idea is relatively this...

1) TBD
2) Perkins Sq to the Bar (via greyhound or barn)
3) Bar through M st. Park down towards Black Falcon Shipping Terminal
4) Black Falcon to Sullivan's @ Castle Island (aka Fort Independence)
5) Into Fort Independence for the finale, where you have to hunt down a soldier carrying a finale radio (and he randomly spawns all over the place), to call for rescue and either A) Fight off the hordes until a chopper comes to rescue you, or B) fight your way all the way back to the pier for a boat rescue, while avoiding murderous lighting attracted to mobs.

The fifth map is actually where I started this. Sort of a big mini-campaign, I figured if I wanted to quit and not put the effort into a whole campaign, I could and still have it something fun and playable and somewhat complete.

Another reason for working backwards was because I'm basing this on a real place all pretty much 3/4 scale, and the limits of the world spawns, I can only split levels at certain places. As it is, I'm going to have to cheat a bit on map4, but on the plus side, it's all a shipping terminal so it won't be noticable if I shrink it down a bit.

The reason the first map is TBD, I could go two ways, one is longer and cooler, but is crap load more work and would actually need to be two maps. And the other is easier and one map. That's why it's going to be the last thing I do, see how burned out I get.

shotgunefx

05-11-2011, 07:15 PM

a few more...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3071/5711998390_07ffc66cb7_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2782/5711998642_866c32f83d_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3406/5711998832_e677a42579_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2344/5711999002_7c5d586b2b_b.jpg

AjBastian27

05-11-2011, 07:34 PM

shotgunefx

05-12-2011, 01:23 PM

All still very rough, the events are way too easy, but stab and refine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6daAZN1qFk&hd=1

shotgunefx

05-13-2011, 09:19 AM

O thats amazing!!! These 2 maps look fantastic! And the idea of different crescendos is great. I think it should either be have an option which one to go to. Or create dynamic pathing, which the crescendo u have to go to is random. For example, 1st play through could be bus depot, 2nd playthrough could be warehouse! Thatd be awesome. Alternating between a moving and traditional crescendo sound like a lot of fun!

Hmmm, I wrote like a five paragraph response to this, I have no idea what happened to it. Anyway, the long and short is for VS, probably need to keep it the same event choices for balance issues, and for SP, I don't think you can retain any state outside of the game session.

Funny, I was pretty much guessing at the interior of the "barn" building. Though I talked to someone last night who had been in it and seen the pics said that's all it pretty much what it is. Two leaves on the side that make the top "floor" and mostly empty.

I've got most of the nav issues straightened out and have them spawning where I want. A lot of the problems I was having was the incremental updates to the nav. As I'm not used to working on "flat" ground, I forget about props. So I'd have one firebarrel blocking off giant nav squares.

The thing is, I want a couple commons inside, and I want a couple to come through the skylight, but I want most of them to come in through the windows (and when the doors are unlocked, through the doors) and drop downs (which have some cover for them.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2221/5716298998_3135cc5be1_b.jpg

I HATE random hordes spawning behind you in a corner. So a little judicious use of nav attributes and they are pretty much doing what I want (mostly spawning outside, mostly coming in through the ground floor windows).

Likewise, a little splitting and some manual connections and the bus event is much better.

Couple other random fixes. Adding some more cubemaps around fixed a lot of the terrible reflections I was getting.

I also fixed this....

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2145/5716299638_83f23a5b26_b.jpg

Apparently cubemaps, one is applied to the entire brush (I always thought it was post triangulation), so even though there are a ton of cubes here, that large red tinted brush is using the cube all the way down the end. A little clipping and it looks much better.

I also added some more props for cover but the lighting is iffy, I'm guessing it's the poly count on the models. But some on the other side look totally unlit and wrong, guess I'll have to play with lighting origins. (and yes, that is vertex lit)

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3182/5716299768_6956968935_b.jpg

Also pretty much done fencing in the bus depot and the surrounding areas. Happy accident but everything just lined up with the models

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3212/5715736873_a8485719e2_b.jpg

Though I have a feeling once it's on real terrain it's gonna be a pita. Maybe I'll make a few angled version I can approximate the the ground with and then just move the terrain until it looks good.

The_insane_3004

05-13-2011, 02:56 PM

Is going to be hard to compete with :)

Some of best word I have ever seen.

shotgunefx

05-14-2011, 04:49 AM

Is going to be hard to compete with :)

Some of best word I have ever seen.

Thanks, but you may want to reserve judgment until I actually finish something :)

Little random, seeing I was doing a lot of playing yesterday with texture lights, decided to do a version of the traffic sign that lit itself. Came out pretty well. At first I thought it didn't cast entity shadows but it does. One thing, you need to make the texture DARK, or it comes out way too light (and even blooms).

I also added a little baffle of block light to shape it a bit and make it directional and also to let a bit of light leak out the sides, gives it a kind of neat little color, a bit of an arc shaped swath that is at the base.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3179/5718045121_b5ea21f79a_b.jpg

Some more pics of the depot, changed up the street lights a bit, and did some more detailing. Still have to hold off on a lot until I place it on the final terrain.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2486/5718043779_e14fed28ef_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2345/5718044053_a5a892247f_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2245/5718044505_8e3090a7de_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2116/5718044771_a59817f44f_b.jpg

I'll say I really feel like I'm hitting a moving target. So much stuff around here is changing as I go. That old cool decrepit garage, just got it's first paint job in 50yrs, glad I got the pics while I could.

Speaking of, wish I had a real camera today, a great foggy morning for reference pics.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2207/5718618836_6fc37d0407_z.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3357/5718615854_2afdf4309c_z.jpg

One thing really annoying my area testing is the nav. Now that it's flat, the nav squares are huge which means that one little barrel, car, whatever blocks off huge areas. I tried setting nav_max_auto_area_size (or whatever it's properly called) from 16384 to something a bit more reasonable for my needs, like 128, but no luck. Still making giant nav areas.

The_insane_3004

05-14-2011, 02:27 PM

Thanks, but you may want to reserve judgment until I actually finish something :)

I have watch your progress since first post, very good work! As for until I actually finish something my campaign is three years in making and still haven't finished one level.

Great Progress, excellent work, can not wait to play. :)

Beezy

05-14-2011, 11:03 PM

I just clicked the Google Maps link and toured the city.

This is a really great and accurate recreation you have in the making.

shotgunefx

05-15-2011, 09:22 AM

I have watch your progress since first post, very good work! As for my campaign is three years in making and still haven't finished one level.

Great Progress, excellent work, can not wait to play. :)

Three years? I thought I was bad lol, but I have to be closer to 2yrs than 1yr at this point. Crazy.

I just clicked the Google Maps link and toured the city.

This is a really great and accurate recreation you have in the making.

Thanks. Really trying, though you may see some things that were removed in the last 5yrs or so.

So did some more work on the areas around the terminal. Went back to some other building and cut in windows.

Ran into a huge problem with my area_portal_windows, adding the stone shop just killed the bus terminal depot portals. Kept saying there was a leak, but there wasn't. Hinted the hell out of it and the portals didn't look that bad but it just wouldn't work. Oddly enough, if I was outside the map it worked fine. But inside the skybox, the bus terminal would just show the sky until I walked through. So I said hell with it and func_detailed the angled roof of the new building and lost the portal windows.

Need to add some lights but coming along.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2270/5722713070_ff489f10b5_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2121/5722715588_c9c3190140_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2212/5722158123_3f67d14f89_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3369/5722157917_e43e5296d6_b.jpg

The interior is rough, needs some floor trim, but holding off as this is all on grade and I can't really do the rear room until it's on the final terrain.

I'm going to need to make a bunch of stone slab props, low poly as possible.

Did some work on the saferoom bar...
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3620/5722714676_abf82014f5_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3237/5722712520_f5854f1ac0_b.jpg

I might have to cheat some more. As the map is 3/4 scale (so I didn't have to make 8 maps to go to A to Z), some buildings are problematic.

I really want the bar to be as close as possible (and it's already a bit larger than 3/4), I'm thinking I might have to 1:1 it. Shouldn't be too bad where it's located. I should be able to steal a bit from the bus yard and bump the garage over without disturbing too much. I already had to steal a bit for the stone yard to not be too small.

A view from the top, coming along quite nice. It's actually getting pretty filled in. Keep in mind, the park wasn't in this compile and that's a 1/3 of the size of what's here.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2060/5722159351_3b425d3626_b.jpg

shotgunefx

05-16-2011, 02:57 AM

So did a bit more on the stone masons.

For now, the slabs of stone are func_details (in a func_instance), I'll put them through propper when I get a chance.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3567/5725457543_62e806fb4e_b.jpg

I tried to make the light a bit more interesting. Used a similar trick as the barn, as I can put spots in the window (as they would light up the window models), I put them outside with shaped blocklight baffles to make them look like they project through the windows.

Not sure how I feel about it, it looks pretty good I think, but the sharp teeth like shadows I went for are not that noticeable when your'e on the ground. Still breaks it up though.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5227/5725458167_65a61ea805_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5103/5725457997_3817fd7f92_b.jpg

This was accidental, don't think I like it. Maybe if it had more perspective or something, but the chainlink shadows just aren't doing it for me... maybe if I clip the ground in front of it and lower the lightmap scale as well it would look good.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5132/5726013172_8984d0ee9b_b.jpg

Experimenting with getting a peeling paint look on the trailer, getting there, but not quite..., I want the paint to be dull and the keyed in graffiti to shine through. Which it does but still not quite happy with it.
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5101/5726015348_7612682432_b.jpg

As far as the evac sign I was talking about earlier and how I used a texlight instead and a blocklight baffle, you can get some interesting light effects... this is a pic of what I was talking about from above.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2711/5726015182_97a3bb9e67_b.jpg

shotgunefx

05-16-2011, 02:07 PM

Hmmm, just realized just how expensive the flashlight is (and muzzleflash).

I was getting a massive drop in fps in one area, but only sometimes, usually when mobs where coming. At first I attributed it to the number of them, but it turns out it's the flashlight.

Take this picture...

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5103/5725457997_3817fd7f92_b.jpg

That is a LOT of faces to project that texture (and dynamic shadows).

I mean it's still playable and all, but I might need to rework it a bit. I doubt when I propper those it will make much difference (though maybe it will because of the bounding boxes), so I think I might have to talk those slabs down by 40-50%

Xopaa

05-16-2011, 09:54 PM

shotgunefx

05-17-2011, 06:08 AM

not sure if this still applies to source but I think theres a benefit to compiling many objects as a single model, as opposed to doing each board a separate model.

there was an article/tutorial somewhere...I remember the word clustering...and a trash can or a dumpster.

that is all I can see for now..I must rest.

Well it's been awhile since I've been up to date with the underpinnings of DX or OpenGl, but I'm guessing some stuff is doesn't really change

Off the top of my head,I can think of a few benefits of one model would be

Visibility testing for one, one bounding box to rotate/scale/transform, is it out of the view cone? Too far away? done processing. So in the case of those stone slabs groups, you'd only have to do it once, vs 50 or so times.

Models don't normally self intersect, not static ones anyway, some I wouldn't be surprised if there was some optimization for that case as far as the rendering pipe line goes.

Also I may be wildly out of date on this but I think internally models are compile to specific types of vertex lists optimized for the DX/OpenGL/etc pipeline to improve performance, so I imagine there would be overhead with loading those as well

I imagine you could have too big a model as well. If you have a static prop that's expensive and can be seen at all times (like a surrounding skybox), you might be better off clipping it into 4 models, so at least 2 can be quickly rejected in any given frame

Though as far as the flashlight, it's odd, nothing has changed on the map, and I'm still taking a big hit on that one area, but as of last night, it's not nearly as big, so I'm guessing at least partially, I had something else going on in my pc. Now it's like 25fps, but when I first wrote about it, was like 50fps

I'll have to go look for that tutorial

shotgunefx

05-19-2011, 02:39 AM

So haven't done too much, just tweaking the lighting, brightened up the light_env a bit, tweaked a lot of the streetlights, worked on some graffiti (found a nice zombie bible quote from Ezekiel). Though I wanted to add the park instance VMF and had all kinds of problems. Was complaining of leaks, but only with fog volumes (and the similar size triggers) and the func_detail blockers. Hide them, no leak, but well inside the skybox.

The really annoying thing was it wasn't showing me where it thought the leak was. The point file would just show a line from outside the map to the func_instance.

Hiding those particular volume entities made it go away. So after making sure like ten times I had no leak (which I didn't, grrrr), I decided to just cut and paste those entities into the main map (paste in place, so exact same place) and... works fine. Annoying.

Not sure what the issue was as it was the same instance as before and didn't have this issue with earlier versions of the map. The only thing I can think of is the messy skybox I had in the earlier version, was probably "double" boxed. Anyway, figure I would mention it for posterity.

Though I will say, looking at the overview, I'm quite happy with the rate of progress this round.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5309/5736509868_c3d6d9ed26_o.jpg

Still a ton to do but for the time I've put in, that's a pretty good chunk of a map. Much of it with a good deal of detail.

shotgunefx

05-21-2011, 01:53 AM

So did a bit more work, some interior detailing, some light changes, decided that if you go the 1st Street route, you're going to have to go through the yard into a semi-one way drop as the street is blocked by a truck accident. If you lost a member while trying to get over the fence, you'll be able to run around and get them but it's a hike. If you make it, through the backyards (which aren't built yet), into the park

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2376/5741906767_d28165354d_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3291/5742459070_2b5c9c214b_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2039/5741907359_6a41e9ec01_b.jpg

The weather here has been perfect for reference photos, just insane fog the last week. I really wish I could get the map to look like it. But I'm going to try as much as I can.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3304/5742397570_0321c99c6d_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2548/5741841715_51e1de208c_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3429/5742411902_200551a14a_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2519/5742424810_092129c187_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3091/5742438056_8f8cda5cfb_b.jpg

Some of the areas you'll see (proceeding the current start)

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2717/5741911643_f0c5832d84_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3360/5742451304_aa19deba08_b.jpg

...continued

shotgunefx

05-21-2011, 02:09 AM

As I had said before, one of the reasons I had started where I was, was because I wasn't sure what route I was going to take you to get to there. No after tonight, I'm thinking the massive transformer yard, just such a cool location. You were going to have to walk by it anyway, if I'm gonna take the time, might as well make you detour through it. Though if I make electrocution a possibility, might be to OP for infected.

Also abuts an ancient ship works. Nothing much left though still looks cool.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2218/5742497902_e83fe8a93b_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3366/5742503256_c80553890a_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3648/5742537086_83204694f2_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5067/5741978211_3f34e70a39_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2347/5742507084_9e4262fe07_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5309/5741949879_a8b87c6c4e_b.jpg

Now to grouse for a minute. If you've been following, you know I've spent the last week or so on the stone works. Guess what? GONE.

Like totally gone save the one shed. Empty. Unbelievable how fast things are changing when you catalog them. The store at the beginning? Done over, the garage next to the safe room bar? Same, it's only been like six weeks, crazy. This stuff has been here decades at least.

shotgunefx

05-21-2011, 09:03 PM

A rough pass...

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5302/5744508845_8766b30e85_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2767/5745056618_49ff1b8e1e_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3561/5745056296_42a07df811_b.jpg

Lighting needs a lot of work though

mAd-

05-22-2011, 02:41 AM

Keep working, dude. :]

shotgunefx

05-22-2011, 03:59 PM

I aim to ;)

So did a bit more work on the lighting, took down the scales in the front area, really love the texture shadows but it takes sooo long.

Thing I got the sodium lights looking better, though I need to whiten the sprite a bit.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5304/5748022227_fe1da4fd57_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2539/5748021059_193b1c42ed_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5068/5748570808_d165dce23a_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5102/5748570500_4a0e93a45c_b.jpg

Also started working on the transformer models.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2359/5748608998_a954bcf752_b.jpg

Not sure how I want this to go. I like the idea of them being "on" but might be too much. Everyone but the boomer could potentially have in insta-kill. Maybe I'll make it so only one or two are "on", can't really see in those photos above, but they light up at night, so I could just use that (and some ambient_generic buzzing) to indicate which is which.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3509/5741456723_e36e18c9d9_z.jpg

zapwizard

05-24-2011, 12:39 PM

I have some electrical plant models you can use if you want. They aren't terribly detailed close up, but should get you a start. Message me when I am on steam.

shotgunefx

05-24-2011, 05:09 PM

I have some electrical plant models you can use if you want. They aren't terribly detailed close up, but should get you a start. Message me when I am on steam.

Thanks, will do. The main models, just going with the overall theme of the campaign (detailed irl map), I need to actually make them and be somewhat close to what's there, but there is another yard, in between that I'll need to make and you can't really see it well (and I can't get a good sense of what's in there), so I have a bit of latitude there.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3304/5753222544_e61a124270_b.jpg

Still not close to done and the textures are temporary, but here's the main part of the main model), which will be used about 15 times.

On that note, any benefit to sub models? I mean, I have those 3 electrodes coming out of the top, they are all the same. should those be sub parts to the model? (they'll appear six more times) Does it have any performance gain or loss?

Also wish I could figure out the terrible normal mapping on models. I took it out in this pic, but I had a radiator like pattern to the heatsinks on the sides, and in game, the lighting just looks so bad on it. (Like the brick arch models) But obviously the survivors use bump maps and they don't look like that and I know some other models do.

AjBastian27

05-29-2011, 11:12 AM

what u been up to dude? :)

shotgunefx

05-29-2011, 12:13 PM

what u been up to dude? :)

I've gotten sidetracked a bit a bit by my foray into Blender. Well not really sidetracked as it's all stuff for the map, but re-focused. Especially as I don't want to even attempt to texture those transformer models in Sketchup, so it's to step up to a better toolset.

As far as the map itself, i've done a bit of detailing, and whatnot.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2010/5763186818_64d7545dcd_b.jpg

Lot's of little things. Been tweaking the lights, oh and with all the textureshadows my vrad is taking over 2 hours now on final a 6 core machine. boo

Did some props for the park in Blender.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2413/5770578901_e4a52a5c80_b.jpg

Next I'm going to retexture all the awnings,trims and porch models in Blender.

Did some yards and whatnot, was trying to get blood pools. Basically start off clear but as you kill zombies in it's volume, the water would get progressively more bloody, thought it would be a nice touch as this area has a few pools. Unfortunately, you really can't do it. To use a material proxy, you need to parent the material modifier to the object, but water needs to be a world brush. Couldn't find a way around it.

I can get bloody water fine, or I think it looks decent, I just can't change it.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3595/5771118306_a5a506c828_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2584/5763183750_3cf96f31e8_b.jpg

Might fake it with a simple red model the size of the pool and just change the alpha from transparent to opaque as it gets bloodier.

AjBastian27

06-06-2011, 07:05 PM

dude you gotta fill me in whats up doggy digglz?

shotgunefx

06-06-2011, 10:07 PM

dude you gotta fill me in whats up doggy digglz?

Not too much going on, I've been sidetracked with asset creation and blender. The two areas I need to work on most involve a lot of props.

Been working on some army tents, none close to being done, textures need a lot of work too but not bad for roughs.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2238/5806390135_c617eff8c0_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5270/5806954028_eac254beb2_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2699/5806390427_390e758548_b.jpg

I'm tempted to just leave them as such for the moment and continue on the brushwork, feel like the modeling is bogging things down and making me lose steam.

turistas

06-07-2011, 05:44 AM

Not too much going on, I've been sidetracked with asset creation and blender. The two areas I need to work on most involve a lot of props.

Been working on some army tents, none close to being done, textures need a lot of work too but not bad for roughs.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2238/5806390135_c617eff8c0_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5270/5806954028_eac254beb2_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2699/5806390427_390e758548_b.jpg

I'm tempted to just leave them as such for the moment and continue on the brushwork, feel like the modeling is bogging things down and making me lose steam.

you better not give up on this map!!.. im waiting for it.

shotgunefx

06-07-2011, 05:52 AM

you better not give up on this map!!.. im waiting for it.

Not planning on it, building porch models and awnings as we speak ;)

AjBastian27

06-07-2011, 05:57 AM

Not planning on it, building porch models and awnings as we speak ;)

ok dude, well just do whats fun. If blenders getting boring don't worry so much about models no one will care too much, but people will care if we can't play this map!! Just have fun homie

shotgunefx

06-07-2011, 06:07 AM

ok dude, well just do whats fun. If blenders getting boring don't worry so much about models no one will care too much, but people will care if we can't play this map!! Just have fun homie

It's not so much that it's boring, but it's a lot of work and learning and well put, not always fun.

In the time I've put into blender, I probably could have another block done at least. And I do have to do it at some point, (or another package), because some of the models I need eventually are just too difficult to do with Sketchup, texturing anyway.

I've been putting off the tents since almost day one, but they are kind of important. The temporary encampments are particularly important for the castle (which is where this all started) and for a lot of the open spaces as it winds down towards the more open industrial and park areas.

It lets me cheat a bit and add some dynamic while staying true to keeping it an IRL map. Otherwise, all I can really do for the open areas is make fog soup, but that I think would get boring quick if overused.

So I think for some of this stuff, I'm going to keep stabbing and refining just to keep momentum. As long as the stuff is decent approximation of it, I can keep going forward and just beautify them as I go.

turistas

06-07-2011, 07:27 AM

It's not so much that it's boring, but it's a lot of work and learning and well put, not always fun.

In the time I've put into blender, I probably could have another block done at least. And I do have to do it at some point, (or another package), because some of the models I need eventually are just too difficult to do with Sketchup, texturing anyway.

I've been putting off the tents since almost day one, but they are kind of important. The temporary encampments are particularly important for the castle (which is where this all started) and for a lot of the open spaces as it winds down towards the more open industrial and park areas.

It lets me cheat a bit and add some dynamic while staying true to keeping it an IRL map. Otherwise, all I can really do for the open areas is make fog soup, but that I think would get boring quick if overused.

So I think for some of this stuff, I'm going to keep stabbing and refining just to keep momentum. As long as the stuff is decent approximation of it, I can keep going forward and just beautify them as I go.

its intersting how you keep up with your WIP thread, i find them so amusing to read. ;P

AjBastian27

06-07-2011, 06:37 PM

as do I your very skilled. Keep it up this map is looking way up there with Suicide Blitz snd Back to School.

P!geon

06-08-2011, 03:27 PM

Amazing Shotgunefx, I love the way you keep updating it, like a mini development cycle. Really interesting reading through and has given me some food for thought.

Will def be playing this map when it gets released. :)

A question what program do you use for modelling? Which one is better suited for Source.

shotgunefx

06-08-2011, 04:54 PM

Probably a hold over from my car modding days. (the worklog). I do find it helpful for a couple reasons.

One, sometimes I have a problem and I can't remember how I fixed it, and two, documenting a problem and it's solution gives google something to hit when others have the same problem.

I know a lot of problems I had (like the light hunk errors), I would have loved to just been able to google it and find something relevant instead of wasting tons of time. One of the main reasons I was so annoyed when the original thread got deleted.

Amazing Shotgunefx, I love the way you keep updating it, like a mini development cycle. Really interesting reading through and has given me some food for thought.

Will def be playing this map when it gets released. :)

A question what program do you use for modelling? Which one is better suited for Source.

Honestly, more like what don't I use. The only tool I don't use much is XSI (SoftImage), which I probably should, I decided if I was going to learn one complicated program, then I'd probably go with Blender as it has more tutorials and what not.

Sketchup
By and large, Sketchup is my favorite hands down. It's just so easy, plus, I can program stuff if I need to.

The only problem is the UV mapping isn't that great. It's like Hammer. Only really two dimensions (and if it's not, usually the export will make it it anyway)

So if you're modeling something like a porch or a partial brick wall, no problems, as long as you're material repeats, but something more complicated (like a car is really hard to UV map.

The other issue is you're pretty much married to using multiple materials on all but the most simple models, which supposedly is really bad as far as the cost to render.

That's why I'm picking up blender. Still plan on doing a lot of my modeling in Sketchup, just not the texturing.

Sculptris
For organics, I really like Sculptris, plus the polygon reduction tool and the texture and normal mapping facilities are great.

A few issues, no sense of scale, and making hard edges on things is a realy PITA without going through the roof adding polys. Plus it's so damn picky on importing and if it has a UV map (an existing model), it's always going to bring you into paint mode. So you basically have to use Blender or something else to delete the UV map and export it if you want to modify the model.

What I usually do is make a rough model in something else that has measurements), import the model into Blender (if it didn't start there), make sure it's triangulated (so Sculptris doesn't crash), then delete the UV map as needed, then export and import into Sculptris (pain!)

Here's a shark I did totally in Sculptris last year (uv and normals too)

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4095/4788690933_8e204a39e6_b.jpg

Came out pretty good and it's less polys than a tree, 2K I think, but you can see the fins are wonky, that's the hard edge issue I was taking about. But still not so hard to bring it into something else and clean that stuff up.

Khed
Good for tweaks, really like the UV mapping, nice and simple. I usually use this to tweak or edit UVs

Blender
It's starting to grow on me, it's material systems are great, does physics too, but it's just a very steep learning curve, haven't even touched animations yet.

Ultimately I want to redo all the models I've been making so they only use one texture.

Here's a quickie I did today, needed an existing stock light model and wanted it "lit", so I just brought it into blender, added the metal material to the metal, a glowing tex to the bulb and a light and baked it into the existing uv map, came out pretty good. (I did some tweaks since so the light isn't so white)

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2249/5813396668_990bbbef5b_b.jpg

It seems like every package has one thing that's easier or better and a lot of swapping around.

So back to the map. I made some awnings, stuff like that, the little assets I've been putting off, also some new porches (in sketchup) and tweaked the existing textures a bit to add some weathered look to the tintable paint.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2048/5813548286_1f211a2462_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2212/5812979021_01477e7a9f_b.jpg

shotgunefx

06-09-2011, 01:19 PM

Funny that I was just talking about my old battles with the light hunks, because I added a small bit of rough geometry and after my hours of vrad compiling, BAM, engine hunk error.

Same deal as before, for some inexplicable reason, the map will still load if I delete the nav, what nav and lighthunks have to do with each other, who knows.

Pretty lame that I've already got to start taking down light map scales so early, in many places, they are pretty low anyway.

shotgunefx

06-10-2011, 10:17 AM

Well taking the scales down some fixed the problem, again, a lot of stuff was already pretty high, but I took all the roofs down a ton, and went over the giant power plant and took those down as well and that bought me enough budget.

So I managed to rough in some more buildings, not very detailed etc...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2363/5818749882_eb88dab608_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5276/5818182305_65c13bb2c0_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5024/5818750808_2138503631_b.jpg

Can I just say how weird it is that they don't have any regular garage door models (or the brackets, or motor?)

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5303/5818182189_c5ea1fd38e_b.jpg

This area highlights one of the things I'm not really thrilled about IRL maps. Some areas, the houses (especially newer ones) are just boxy and boring. I look at most of these houses, and while they need some detail, they are relatively close already to what the real area looks like.

It's hard to think of how to make them more visually compelling. Detailing will help, and they'll look better on the real terrain and all, but still...

And just because I like these diorama looking screentshots...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3656/5818766082_080b6376e5_b.jpg
(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3656/5818766082_733e994cb3_o.jpg)

btw, l4d2 REALLY doesn't like taking 3840 x 1080 screenshots with farz pegged, crashes after every one.

shotgunefx

06-13-2011, 05:19 PM

So still working on a bunch of little models and assets I need to make, but have started filling in some of the backyard areas and doing some misc detailing. A lot of tweaking with the porch lights trying to get the look I want, no luck yet...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2526/5830899824_5d69b423b1_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3171/5830349561_4b5daa47c3_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5061/5830898902_154e14cf2d_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5160/5830898758_287b54288a_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5037/5830898576_13e1ca1b52_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5067/5830348853_8853f0c119_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3146/5830897770_f99b6740a9_b.jpg

Speaking of the last pic, any workaround for rope being unlit the first map load?

Got to start transitioning the completed geometry to the real terrain soon. One thing that is still a bit of a pain is the displacement curb corners given the way the terrain flows. (I forgot how much I like the natural look of the terrain btw)

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4150/4987432697_e5699afe58_b.jpg

But it got me to thinking, it would be relatively easy (except for the corners, that will take some work) to just have my sketchup plugins generate curb models to match perfectly to the displacement. I might have to explore that.

The corners curb displacements aren't SOO bad, once I do one by hand, relatively easy to move and sew it to other corners, but the outer part of the curb is still tough to not stretch texture wise.

shotgunefx

06-14-2011, 02:56 PM

So still doing mostly detailing type of stuff...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3068/5834182050_bdd262cd2b_b.jpg

But as the first really dense residential area shapes up, getting a feel for how it's gonna play.

Can you say tight?

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2783/5834181386_3c8019c327_b.jpg

I knew it was going to be, but even more so than I thought. Valve maps tend to be on the big side compared to real life, but due to the fact I'm basing it on a real life map, which is actually only 3/4 scale in X,Y, it's REALLY tight.

A fact driven home once I started to do one of the interiors of one of the Three deckers. A lot of these houses are condos that started off as one families, and making them 3 separate units, they are tight as far as stairs and whatnot, but in game, it's going to be really hard to map them.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3138/5834183626_82010b0d1a_b.jpg

Just no room for error in these passages.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2425/5833629297_f6e98f11c7_b.jpg

I was thinking of making the porches (or some of them anyway) breakable, but that may be too OP for the infected. Even without them braking, they can still be perilous

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5028/5833629619_93610fc3b4_z.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3593/5833629873_9719bb6387_z.jpg

Also working on a much improved night time skybox. Now if only I could remember how I exported out of Vue last time without the watermarks. Kind of neat, I realized I could just set the date and time in Sketchup and use the Azimuth and angle to put the sun in the (relatively) right place in Vue for a given time of day.

Xopaa

06-14-2011, 07:05 PM

you export the atmosphere from the atmosphere editor.

then you have to take it into HDR shop ,do a transform shift to the right(i think, its been awhile) and also a single arbitrary rotation of 90deg. i posted a mini-tut here way back when, not sure if it got deleted when they did their spring cleaning.

shotgunefx

06-14-2011, 07:18 PM

shotgunefx

06-14-2011, 07:25 PM

Xopaa

06-15-2011, 11:06 PM

set for cube geometry.
actual dimensions.
turn off auto aspect ratio

then set (4*desired,3*desired)

shotgunefx

06-16-2011, 06:03 PM

set for cube geometry.
actual dimensions.
turn off auto aspect ratio

then set (4*desired,3*desired)

Thanks, I almost had it, did it backwards. Too bad it took 12 hours :/

shotgunefx

06-16-2011, 08:05 PM

So one thing that's been rankling me for awhile are all my flat window models. Due to the way they were built, and my lack of foresight, most of them weren't lined up on the origin, a little off, some different then others. Due to the thiness, this made placing them a pain, sometimes I would have to nudge them fractional units to not z-fight the buildings themselves at distance.

So I finally bit the bullet and fixed all the origins (well at least made the back line up to Y=0). So had to manually adjust 1000+ static props that I had nudged off origin to accommodate for the error, but going forward should be much faster.

Now I need to make some open and broken versions as I open up some of the houses.

P!geon

06-17-2011, 06:54 AM

ThaiGrocer

06-17-2011, 07:32 AM

So I finally bit the bullet and fixed all the origins (well at least made the back line up to Y=0). So had to manually adjust 1000+ static props that I had nudged off origin to accommodate for the error, but going forward should be much faster.
So, uh, how did you actually do that? I (kind of) don't think it's possible that you just sat there tenderly nudging each entity.

shotgunefx

06-17-2011, 07:57 AM

Looking good shotgunefx!

As I said I like your style of blogging the development of a level, its very interesting. I am hoping to perhaps in the future do the same as I really feel it livens up the development cycle, which can otherwise become a bit mundane.

Well I'm glad someone finds it interesting. It's also helpful for myself to refer back to considering how long this is taking ;)

So, uh, how did you actually do that? I (kind of) don't think it's possible that you just sat there tenderly nudging each entity.

Actually, I more or less did. Wasn't so bad (except for the angled bay windows). Basically, all of the "sides" of a building were off the same amount, so I would basically select all the windows on a side and put them back on grid. If you grab near a corner, Hammer will actually usually put a model selection back on grid (but not always, sometimes, had to try a few times). Took me under an hour, but an annoying hour it was.

So roughed in a bit more...

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5064/5842550884_0a2c6ed47c_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2527/5842551154_01078da290_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3424/5842551262_280e1bfbfc_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3206/5842551372_99734f954f_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3019/5842551540_5621de6dae_b.jpg

Rearranged the staircases to open up the apartment/condo areas a bit, still have to cheat a bit, just leaving some rather small rooms locked in these houses.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3190/5842552664_07c3dab630_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2765/5842006021_3525213752_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3594/5842553202_0f4efbcc02_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2518/5842007293_df68134f58_b.jpg

Still waiting for the new skybox to cook, these renders are taking FOREVER. Weird, if I take the very same install of Vue and put it on my new six core, it won't open the file saved on this machine, lame. Otherwise works fine.

The other problem is it really only likes one sun, but I need two, I want the sun at almost the horizon, but I also want moon light and getting it to work right is just a pain. It's almost impossible to fake as the sun is kind of special in Vue from a regular directional light. I think what I'll have to do is a separate render later with the sun moved to where the moon is with moon colored light and photoshop the two together.

shotgunefx

06-17-2011, 07:49 PM

set for cube geometry.
actual dimensions.
turn off auto aspect ratio

then set (4*desired,3*desired)

Hate to be a pain, do you remember if you used splitskybox.exe? I thought that was what I used, and it looks like it from my work last year, but whenever I try and run it on my pfm, it crashes. It also crashes on my old one as well.

shotgunefx

06-17-2011, 07:52 PM

Hate to be a pain, do you remember if you used splitskybox.exe? I thought that was what I used, and it looks like it from my work last year, but whenever I try and run it on my pfm, it crashes. It also crashes on my old one as well.

Nevermind, I figured it out, I've been trying for hours, and of course the second I write about it... fyi for others, need to make a text file describing your skybox and drop that on vtex

Xopaa

06-17-2011, 09:03 PM

was just thinking about reminding you of this in the car today. glad you figured it out on your own.

i gather the HDR shop stuff went ok, thats the real hair puller if you dont know what to do.

shotgunefx

06-18-2011, 08:25 PM

was just thinking about reminding you of this in the car today. glad you figured it out on your own.

i gather the HDR shop stuff went ok, thats the real hair puller if you dont know what to do.

So easy to forget these things when you don't look at them for so long.

Anyway, got a better skybox I think (at least for this map, probably keep that older overcast for the island map).

Not perfect, couldn't get what I wanted out of Vue, it really isn't suited for night skys. Or at least it's not easy I don't think. Very hard to get the sun to act like a moon and simply faking it with an indirect light doesn't work the way you would think. What I really want is the sun just before cresting in the east casting a bit of pink in the sky and a mostly cloudy sky except for an opening for the moon.

The other issue I had was the Vue fog, to get the look where I wanted up high, the fog just isn't working at ground level even though the max ground density is 100%, so I just photoshopped the horizon. I may give it a go in blender one of these days, but closer to what I want so good enough for now.

Opinions?

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2694/5846932469_97fb0dd265_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5024/5846932031_aa9caaeb30_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2754/5847491792_c986bfd9b2_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5271/5847490484_e21a82d047_b.jpg

Personally I think it looks better with the night time sky.

AjBastian27

06-19-2011, 06:27 AM

love it, slightly brighter it looks great

P!geon

06-19-2011, 06:42 AM

Yeah looks a lot better, I have to say! Keep up the good work. :)

shotgunefx

06-19-2011, 09:19 AM

love it, slightly brighter it looks great

Thanks. Oddly enough, It's actually darker.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3369/5849324636_425ebda53f_b.jpg

I didn't touch the lighting at all, the fog went from 8 8 8 to 1 2 3, but I think having more hues makes the scenery pop a bit more.

AjBastian27

06-19-2011, 10:20 AM

well I guess I just love the new color more lol :) makes it seem a little fresher to me

shotgunefx

06-19-2011, 06:11 PM

well I guess I just love the new color more lol :) makes it seem a little fresher to me

I like it a lot more myself. Think it's far better looking, though hazing out in the park doesn't look quite as good as it did. I may have to tweak my fog model color as well as alpha to get the result I want.

AjBastian27

06-19-2011, 06:29 PM

I like it a lot more myself. Think it's far better looking, though hazing out in the park doesn't look quite as good as it did. I may have to tweak my fog model color as well as alpha to get the result I want.

ahhh don't worry about it, JUST HURRY AND GIVE US A BETA! :) cant wait to play this its beautiful

shotgunefx

06-21-2011, 01:20 AM

ahhh don't worry about it, JUST HURRY AND GIVE US A BETA! :) cant wait to play this its beautiful

Trying but I fear it shall be awhile.

On that note, started looking at the terrain again. Decisions decisions...

I just did a quick test without curbs, I only placed the first few buildings at their approximate level.

First off, one problem off the bat that didn't really come up before is errors in google's data. There's a few spots where whatever algorithm they use to filter out the houses out of the terrain data is wonky.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3051/5855462649_c67d967783_b.jpg

The bottom edge is the ocean, the hard crease near the top left is the bottom of the park. In larger areas, it works quite well, but in some of the more densely constructed areas, you get errors. Basically where you see the big triangles. Some of it's not so bad, but some of it...

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5141/5856017748_06f41f86ab_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2796/5856018136_8d3a5cbf53_b.jpg

Now the street does rise that much from one end to the other (you'll notice in some of the following screenshots, houses near the park are "buried" almost to the second floor. Which raises another issue I've been putting off which I'll get to in a minute.), but that big divot should not be and there's a few. So at the very least I'm going to have to add some filtering to the google data before I start actually doing this for real.

The other issue is how to handle fences, when a yard can slope 5-10ft from one end to the other, it causes huge alignment issues. I suppose I could mod the fence models for a few given slope degrees (luckily they mostly run NESW)

I really do like the natural look of the slopes though ,I'd hate to cut it back to flat ground, or even semi flat ground. A lot of the hilly areas wouldn't look right, plus I like the subtle depth it gives things...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2681/5855466325_dc4726c57c_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3012/5855466899_4ffb66d0da_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3007/5855466687_b55d1a3e35_b.jpg

Proably have to think about this for a bit

shotgunefx

06-21-2011, 06:44 AM

Well did some fiddling around and figured out a plan.

As far as sketchup, gonna just be lazy and draw over the lumps in the GE data, my plugin samples the whole model so nice and easy.

As far as the curbs, given the hills and draped displacements, I always found the corners unsatisfactory, the problem is once you start sculpting a corner, the texture stretching just looks horrible with the concrete lines, so just going to use more displacements, using only 4-8 corners on most blocks and as it comes out of Sketchup, easy to do, just drawing some more lines.

Did a quick test.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5036/5856721572_c23f4b096f_o.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2556/5856166403_34e422c095_o.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5075/5856166549_ea433da589_b.jpg

Looks pretty good. This might illustrate my issue with the curb models better.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5233/5856791698_b4a29f132b_o.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2476/5856236571_7a8954a8df_o.jpg

Just no way to line those up without tons of gaps, plus not all blocks are rectangular, on the plus side, I get lightmaps and blends

shotgunefx

06-21-2011, 09:01 PM

So now that the Castle will be opening soon and I can get the rest of the interior details I need for the rebuild, I decided to compile up map 5 (or map 1 depending how you look at it)and see where I left off (it's been almost a year YIKES).

First thing that impresses me is how poorly it runs. Definitely playable, but just shows how much I didn't know what I was doing at the time. A lot of it is that it's a giant an open map that's entirely visible at all times and no clipping out and tons of effects and dynamic lighting. So I did a few tests and whatnot on optimization, I couldn't do too much though as some things will just need to wait for the rebuild (areaportals, etc). I think I'll be able to triple the frame rate without breaking too much of a sweat.

The second thing that impresses upon me is OMG I can't believe how much work I've put into this and for how long. Granted a lot of it was just learning what I was doing, and having to do it all manually before I started building tools, but I wouldn't even want to guess how many hours, I wouldn't want to know. On the plus side, all those tools should make the rebuild (at 1:1 scale instead of 3/4) relatively easy and many assets will transfer easily.

For those who don't remember it, some screenshots.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2779/5859056278_f96f19ec7e_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5261/5859055388_2a305bfa29_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3220/5858502101_f38906ff0c_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5221/5858502781_c591f31a64_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5230/5859054748_e28f65bcc4_b.jpg

A few more with the fog dialed way back (often you can't see 500 units ahead of you)

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2739/5859109516_ae3926124b_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3272/5859109454_0a7c94998b_b.jpg

Of course I never got around to doing the military encampment because I was waiting on some of those assets like the tents I've been building.

Xopaa

06-21-2011, 10:03 PM

shotgunefx

06-22-2011, 11:07 AM

hey for doing your displacment curbs just turn off physics for them and you can go for broke on making em smaller/more detailed. if you end up with props getting pushed around and showing the curbs clipping you can always slap down a no-draw.

That's a good tip. Though fortunately, while I need to work on the normals (lighting) in my displacement generator, I've not had any physics problems with them. The reason I don't want to carve up the corners too much is I'd like to make them still sew if possible.

Funny though, I've had maps not compile for physics reasons when they contained very sculpted displacements (like making a I-beam out of one that I could bend through wreckage) and it never occurred to me to turn off collisions. I just deleted them or reworked them.

Xopaa

06-22-2011, 09:52 PM

lol, you gotta throw this in...
http://www.box.net/shared/154kr4e0vz

mAd-

06-23-2011, 12:43 AM

Nice, better, Last Bastion.

Why you have mic open when you take screenshots btw?

shotgunefx

06-23-2011, 11:44 AM

lol, you gotta throw this in...
http://www.box.net/shared/154kr4e0vz

Funny, I was thinking the same thing when I saw it on wired. Though now that they've finally caught Whitey Bulger, some of those in-jokes are no longer going to work.

Nice, better, Last Bastion.

Why you have mic open when you take screenshots btw?

Honestly, I just forget, I don't even have a mic plugged in. When I do use one, I'll enable open mic and then just forget to turn it back off.

As far as the state of things, it's time to go back to the Sketchup end and cleanup my curb plugins. I've put some time in the last few days

For the most part, they work fine, but some things are not quite right. For one, the side textures are off axis, which Hammer will fix, but the lighting info is off as well and needs to be corrected. The problem is, I know just enough to make it work, but there are definitely things I'm missing and the VMF docs on the wiki don't answer a lot of things clearly.

For instance, the ordering of faces, what's the bottom left vertex of an arbitrary plane in 3d space? Things like that. It looks like from my further testing that lighting info is coming from, not "normals" but "offset_normals", rotate a cube and that (and the texture offsets) are all that change.

The other thing I want to change is this...
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5302/5620197635_817b959f78_b.jpg

While this works and looks good in game (and sews), a lot of wasted luxels. And while it doesn't appear to render the sides embedded in the ground according to mat_wireframe, I'm not sure it doesnt' have an impact. What I want it to do is manipulate the sides so they are all the "curbheight" all around. So if I say it's 8 units above ground, the bottom will follow the top 8 units down (or maybe curbheight+1 to avoid gaps)

So that's probably what I'll be doing over the next week or so. Maybe I'll reach out to Nem or some of the other authors of displacement tools for some help.

Xopaa

06-24-2011, 03:27 AM

shotgunefx

06-24-2011, 09:15 AM

not sure if Im understanding this correctly, but in say, wings3d you could select all the top faces and then inset as a region. I kinda remember sketch-up having an inset tool put can remember if it was per-poly only.

Sketchup has a drape tool but it just merges the geometry onto whatever you're draping to. Also meshes (or TINs in Sketchup) have a different polygon order so they would be incompatible with displacements.

Either way, what Sketchup does wouldn't work for my needs, but that's not the problem, the stuff I do is easy (relatively) it's the actual generation of the VMF that's a bit of a pain with the lack of documentation out there. It works ok for the most part, but some stuff in my implementation (from well over a year ago) is broken, like normals, textures on side faces, etc. The valve export doesn't support displacements.

Here's what my tool does.

You basically make a layer that's simply composed of quad polygons. You select this layer and run the tool and it will spit out a vmf that will contain brushes in the shape of those quads at the worldheight and depth you specify, displaced to whatever was in your model.

So for instance, import a mountain + valley terrain from Google Earth, make a new layer and draw a bunch of flat quads where you want your displacements to be, run the plugin, instant map. It skips generating displacements on all the shared faces (which wouldn't be visible)

Now the other thing it does is let you generate curbs and walkways. Let's say you wanted to drape a concrete walkway (or curb or whatever type of path) over this new map at a fixed height, say 8 units, you make another layer, draw your walkway, run the plugin (set the height to 8) and out pops another VMF you cut and paste into your terrain vmf that will pretty much perfectly flow over the original.

So using the Island as an example, the terrain for the newer version looks like this.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4151/5037666085_806b77a8c1_b.jpg

Each of those polygons will be a displacement, I can draw the edges where it makes sense for texturing boundaries.

I run the plugin, done.

Now I need that mile of walkways... draw em out
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4127/5029714595_b74ece80bf_b.jpg

I run the plugin, set the curbheight to say, 5 units and the result is

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4111/5029715009_be672da736_b.jpg

A perfect path flowing over the main geometry (which is much hillier than it looks in this cap) and everything sews together. For something this big, making that path would take weeks if not months, I know this because the first time, I did do it by hand and after god knows how many hours, still didn't look very good.

This is also what I used for the park which I was able to knock out the bulk of it minus details in a couple hours.

But now instead of parks and islands, the main terrain are hilly streets and instead of walkways, I'm overlaying curbs.

So I just need to fix a few things, I mean I don't have to, it looks good enough, but I should. I want to fix the texturing on the sides, the lighting normals, and instead of having the sides of the displacmenet extend all the way to the base of the brush (which in some places may be a 1000 units down on side), I just need to code them to manipulate the sides to be the specified curb height, so on that block that's on top of a hill, the bottom side of the curbs will be 8 units down, not 1008. I'm not even sure it matters, it looks like it's culling them, but I'm not 100% sure. Either way computing all those luxelss wastes light map space and I'm already bumping up against that and increases compile time.

I also want to make it respect hidden geometry and ignore faces in the selection. The raytest method in sketchup samples everything hidden or not. So if the terrain dips below the snapshot, the world will be flat there, not a huge deal, you just need to unlock the snapshot and move it straight down below, but more of a convienence.

Xopaa

06-24-2011, 11:01 AM

shotgunefx

06-24-2011, 01:46 PM

I had a map that I wanted the roads to be more realistic, so I grabbed the terrain from sketch-up and exported it as a crappy smd, then loaded that into hammer, dropped a grid of 256 diplacement brushes over it, and then..this is where it gets good...I used the sculpting tool to make the displacements conform to the model, one freakin vertex at a time.

I didnt finish that map*, but for 200 yards, it was the best dam road youve ever seen.

*I actually finished the terrain, just burnt out on the whole campaign afterwards.

I hear you, that's not far off of how I did the first version of the castle (and the GE data sucked then), then I quit and wrote the first plugin, still with the low res GE data, a week of sculpting, then I did the pathway by hand, made the rough blocks in sketchup as flat blocks and exported as brushes, then in Hammer I tried to cut and adjust as much as I could, then made them displacements , adjusted vertex by vertex for like 4 weeks and still looked terrible, that's when I wrote the second plugin lol.

The cool thing is as it's all in Sketchup, I can redo it all in a snap and just re-export the files. It's always been my intention at some point to clean these up and put them up for the community.

shotgunefx

06-27-2011, 02:56 AM

That's a good tip. Though fortunately, while I need to work on the normals (lighting) in my displacement generator, I've not had any physics problems with them. The reason I don't want to carve up the corners too much is I'd like to make them still sew if possible.

Funny though, I've had maps not compile for physics reasons when they contained very sculpted displacements (like making a I-beam out of one that I could bend through wreckage) and it never occurred to me to turn off collisions. I just deleted them or reworked them.
Finally got around to putting some work in on it.

You must be psychic, all of a sudden, physics issues. And turning off collisions does not fix it, just vbsp crashing no matter what. On the plus side, was an easy fix, I just had to turn down the powers on the corners only (and the physics are fine too). Didn't like that many vertices in such a small area.

Anyway, did a test block, but didn't have time to put any geometry on it really.

This area is somewhat flat, but you get the idea...

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5067/5876578234_64e4cbe047_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5147/5876579336_f276a55e5f_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5268/5876579534_5b744bfc08_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5319/5876017799_773545bd85_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5149/5876017961_9f5586a904_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5200/5876578096_ab0aaf5571_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5158/5876016819_9c345b67b5_b.jpg

Still not perfect and not as automated as I'd like (the new version is worse at suppressing displacements on shared faces so I have to manually remove them) but it works better for the most part and normals look better, perhaps even correct ;)

The curb sides are actually only curbheight high now instead of going down to the brush face as well.

I also forgot how much of a pain placing static props on "real" geometry is.

The_insane_3004

06-27-2011, 04:00 AM

Sky texture is amazing... but this is probably going to be one of FIRST maps without completely flat roads everywhere :D (That is actually one of the things that I am looking forward to...)

Excellent work as usual. Keep up good work... I just hope that when I finally finish something, maybe my work could at very least be half as good as yours :)

Xopaa

06-27-2011, 09:54 AM

gotta agree about the sky, nice Vue:D

Okami Amaterasu

06-27-2011, 11:53 AM

This is looking great. I'm looking forward to playing this map. The models are great too, by the way.

shotgunefx

06-27-2011, 12:33 PM

Thanks guys. While I really like the sky, it's not quite what I was trying to go for. I just couldn't model it the way I wanted to in Vue. I wanted a bit more moonlight on the clouds and just the hint of color of the sun rising (which is where you're headed, due east)

Vue clouds don't do well with multiple light sources at all. What I wanted was something a bit closer to a mix of what I have and this...

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5155/5877690395_8ebb3099a6_z.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5188/5878257210_d2c3777d36_z.jpg

The pics are a bit blown out, because of the long exposure, but you can kind of see what I mean, the yellow highlights and shadows on the clouds.

So I may try two more things. One, model it in Blender, blender has a built in cloud generator which I've played with a bit, and exporting to a cubemap friendly file should be easy.

The second, taking a 360 degree photo on a night I like and doing a bit of photoshop. A recent hack-a-day article (http://hackaday.com/2011/06/16/360-degree-photography-uses-very-easy-post-processing/) got me thinking.

I just ordered a 4" mirrored gazing ball, now I just need to figure out how I'm going to mount it to my gf's DSLR and find a spot high enough to do some tests. If it works out, I could probably get permission to do them from the top of Castle Island (maybe Southie High or the Dorchester Heights monument too).

Which would be pretty cool. Besides it would be accurate, instant skybox. Especially because the Island is by Row's wharf and there are a ton of buildings and things there that need to be in the tex or skybox models. Then again, even if it looks good, may be too photo like to fit with everything else, we'll see

shotgunefx

06-27-2011, 07:03 PM

So started "moving in" on the first block, bit of a pain, lot's of height adjustments, clipping out the overdraw areas and twiddling with fences. So far the fences aren't as bad as I thought they might be.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5149/5879531864_101c3008b8_b.jpg

Forgot to cut in the ramp, doh!
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5271/5878968041_0463572925_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5235/5879532300_0e139484fc_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5061/5878968947_b774819107_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6028/5879532608_493418e99a_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5144/5878969269_6a3027bfa6_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5195/5878967719_6e7009152e_b.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5067/5879530084_ee1fa98868_b.jpg

zapwizard

06-29-2011, 04:29 PM

Glad to see this coming along. I finally seem be able to get a few hours a week into my map.

shotgunefx

06-29-2011, 04:41 PM

Glad to see this coming along. I finally seem be able to get a few hours a week into my map.

Me too though times been tight as of late.

Now that I'm getting a better sense of process, I think I'll be able to do the subsequent ones pretty quick. One thing I need to do is spend more time deciding how to cut up the curbs and terrain to align with the boundaries of buildings and yards. Seeing not everything is in Sketchup, not as easy as I'd like but I think I've got a good process for it now.

Also I think I'm gonna have to ditch the "wet" materials. I did a quick test vid a couple days ago and you can see the cubemaps make noticeable boundaries on the displacements. I suppose I could just add cubemaps but I think with the size of the maps (and the amount of road and curbs) I might have issues with the number needed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WEdGeC8iJo

Anyone happen to know what the limits are on cubemaps?

P!geon

07-03-2011, 03:48 PM

Looking good, a slight bump as we where getting near to the bottom of the 1st page. And well I have heard bad rumours about page 2...:eek:

shotgunefx

07-04-2011, 03:09 PM

Looking good, a slight bump as we where getting near to the bottom of the 1st page. And well I have heard bad rumours about page 2...:eek:

Not quite sure I follow...

P!geon

07-05-2011, 08:22 AM

Not quite sure I follow...

I just though I would give it a bump to keep it from going into page 2, no biggie. :)

shotgunefx

07-05-2011, 08:47 AM

I just though I would give it a bump to keep it from going into page 2, no biggie. :)

Ahh lol, the bad rumors thing confused me. Well, while I'm at it... last week or so was a mini vacation of sorts and didn't have any time to put in, but should start getting regular hours in again. I did manage to take some reference pictures.

Though I swear this place is disappearing as fast as I can map it. I make the corner store, the corner store gets a makeover. I build the crane warehouse, it's then promptly cleared out. I build the stone yard, that week it's gone. I just go back and start adding the real details to the warehouse that abuts the 3 Decker style houses and backyards? Walk by last night? Empty. Parking lot, the building is still there but suddenly a parking garage and lot all empty.

Speaking of the crane warehouse, I need to make the scuzzy window skins and other overlay stuff because it's not nearly as creepy as real life.
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6045/5905484456_356929c6f8_b.jpg

zapwizard

07-05-2011, 10:42 AM

shotgunefx

07-05-2011, 09:04 PM

I have been working on Seaholm for more then a year, a lot of the area changed since I started it. In fact now the entire plant is off limits and under renovation to be turned into an events center.

Even with Fan Feast which was four months in the making the shopping center kept changing when I went back. One store changed, and another put up a new permanent sign that made me do a double take as to whether or not it was there before.

I mean, there's been a lot of other changes too but I guess why it strikes me so is this is just a one block area and most of this stuff has been around longing then I. I might have to do some running around the rest of the "map" and just take a ton of photos now, because I already know some other places on the chopping block in the areas ahead.

turistas

07-10-2011, 12:15 PM

I mean, there's been a lot of other changes too but I guess why it strikes me so is this is just a one block area and most of this stuff has been around longing then I. I might have to do some running around the rest of the "map" and just take a ton of photos now, because I already know some other places on the chopping block in the areas ahead.

still waiting on this! any ideas if u will do a custom melee?

shotgunefx

07-10-2011, 12:51 PM

still waiting on this! any ideas if u will do a custom melee?

I ran into an issue that was holding me up. Once I started cutting in curb cuts for driveways and such, to make it sew, it got a lot more complicated (and very tedious).

Anyway, there was a bug in my code for certain faces where they would end up reversed, but hammer took them anyway, but cropped them weird (when a displacement adjoined two others on a side, would make a vertex at that point), now that that's fixed, it's back on. This didn't come up earlier with the geometry I was feeding it so it took me awhile to hunt down.

Unfortunately, it means do over, so all that little tweaking and alpha painting and detail needs to be redone. Oh well.

Here's what the curb looks like (need to make a new top tex for the corner tops)

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6008/5923362332_ec3c935095_z.jpg

Making these sew is like playing some brain teaser, not fun. But on the plus side, now the displacements follow property lines which is good for texturing purposes.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6147/5923337962_d816e5a723_b.jpg

This area is really bumming me that I had to do it over. The sat data doesn't really capture it very well, the parking lot side ends up being fairly level to that wall. I had it done, but now get to do it again, joy. Also, that house on the left rankles me even though it's pretty much exactly what it looks like.

It also occurs to me how many blend textures I need to work up.

Also, due to some of the code changes, the height is slightly different now so I have to adjust all my foundations again, boo.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6126/5922771913_3a2d72ae4b_b.jpg

Speaking of blends, gonna have to do some homework on why a blend texture is looking so different lighting wise from the non blend version. Probably the bump transform.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6124/5923336044_c4a8461c69_b.jpg

The sidewalk on the left, you can see how the textures light totally differently as it nears the ramp.

As far as custom melee, planning on it. I actually got a sneak peak of that a few months ago, figuring out the damage types. That giant wrench I posted awhile ago is one (it's about 2ft long) and I have some others in mind. But one problem from what I understand, is to have an icon in the HUD, you need to replace something. Where we left off, we hadn't gotten around that and I don't know if anyone has yet. I really need to go back and look at it again.

P!geon

07-10-2011, 01:40 PM

Ah good old blend textures! Your not the only one that needs to look into them. Light wise that's odd, guessing it's only appearing on custom written blend textures?

shotgunefx

07-10-2011, 08:09 PM

Ah good old blend textures! Your not the only one that needs to look into them. Light wise that's odd, guessing it's only appearing on custom written blend textures?

The VMT is, but I'm just pointing to stock textures. Haven't made any custom ground textures yet, just some decals.

HellaLouYaah

07-10-2011, 08:45 PM

I've noticed when edges are sewed, the blending values seem to merge making the blend appear better. It's possible it does some kind of smoothing for the lightmap maybe.

shotgunefx

07-11-2011, 12:15 PM

Well got a bit more done. I find this part so tedious as I'd like to be onto new areas instead of reworking old ones, but I made some tweaks to my plugins to speed things up going forward, like being able to assign POW's to the displacements in Sketchup instead of multiple passes for exporting the blocks.

As far as the lighting issues on the corner, it was the luxel value being too high on those faces.

I got a little insight into some of the blend issues as well. A lot of the materials have different $bumptransforms, so even when the materials look right, they are often different scales, so I didn't bother with it for the moment as you can easily see the material transitions in the pics below.

I think what I'll do is start clean with my own vmts and then later refine the lighting/bumps/etc.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6005/5926753925_c9c8b2cf24_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6136/5926755439_fbe7bde495_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6144/5927319656_064f0c1b21_b.jpg

As you can see in the pic above, slightly North the crosshair, an odd bit of lighting, the bright line on the ground. This crop up occasionally and it's where the normals are calculated oddly in game for some reason. A bit of the Smooth operator fixes it, but haven't hunted them down yet as they don't normally fall on the actually lines of displacements. I started to make a list with mat_normals but it crashes the game quite often so going to leave it for later.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6023/5926755675_f778338705_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6022/5927319174_1294b9142a_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6009/5926758189_fb650d60f1_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6014/5926758595_bea46bec8a_b.jpg

As you can see in some pics, I haven't height adjusted a lot of props yet. Going forward, once I transfer what I have, I'm going to be doing things quite a bit differently.

Besides often moving func_detail's into World Geometry when I paste, all this work (and adjusting buildings to the terrain) is just too much overhead, so once I start making new areas, they will be on real terrain from the get-go. Which will mean longer iterations but it's just too much a pain to do it in two passes.

Also going to stay in Sketchup longer. While I've gotten a lot more comfortable with Hammer editing, not being able to reimport into Sketchup is just a huge hassle. Especially when laying out property lines. Some of my buildings were done totally in Hammer.

What I ended up doing was exporting for what was done, the new blocks uncut into Hammer, clipping them so the curbs/ramps where in the right places, then using the selection tool to grab the appropriate geometry and use those measurements to draw up the lines in Sketchup. Too much effort. So at the very least, I need the building bases to be correct before blocks move off into the detail stage.

So two more blocks to go and a LOT of prop tweaking and I'll be able to move on to some new areas.

One thing I'm a little wary of, I had two crashes to desktop in an hour which never happens. I'm hoping it's just because the road is a temp and there is no nodraw backing it up (so everything is in the PVS at once) and not some weird physics issue. We'll see.

shotgunefx

07-16-2011, 05:39 PM

A little update. I haven't had much time to work on the campaign, but the time I have had, I've just been loathe to work on the curbing and height adjustments. It's really not so bad but boring, so much like my dishes, I've been putting it off.

So instead of doing nothing, I ended up working on my first real event. An interactive cinematic if you will with a dash of NPC goodness. Turned out really well. With a bit of polish (and baked animations) I think it will be pretty epic, but I can't really do more with that until the map geometry is finalized.

Anyway, I've finally started the terrain again and only one more block to go, though I did have to rearrange some of the existing buildings to gain a couple feet here and there. I'm also probably going to have to steal a bit from the park (about 128 units), I may just fudge it instead of moving it again. Depends on how well the geometry lines up. Worst case scenario, it won't be too hard, most of that is re-exportable from my sketchup tools

turistas

07-17-2011, 04:53 PM

shotgunefx

07-17-2011, 05:52 PM

aw story to hear for your troubles.. it still looks great, i know ill be playing it for sure.. you making custom explosions later on?

There will be a big destruction event, models, particles, etc. It looks ok now but entities can only do so much. Plus I was told the phys objects would be very laggy

shotgunefx

07-18-2011, 04:09 AM

Manage to put a bit of work in.

First order of business. One of the more laborious things was removing the extraneous sides from the curb displacements. It's been broken in my new version of the software for awhile. Basically I'd have to select the 50+ displacements that make up a block, switch to displacement mode, deselect every outward visible face (some quite small), then click destroy, and if I messed that up, do it all again. And if I ran into any sewing issues later (or had to reorganize the layout), I had to do it all again. So I patched that Was surprisingly easy. Guess it was one of those things I just needed time away from. So now it will be easy to tweak (redo) displacements and just re-export them.

So move a lot more of the geometry into place. Lot more work than I thought. Especially in this hilly area. Prop placement is very tricky but it's coming along (though still need to tweak a ton of fences)

Don't worry about the textures, I'm not at the moment, need to make the new blends textures...

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6002/5949636819_39fe74dec0_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6149/5949636899_922bbd07b8_b.jpg
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6012/5949637051_0e016a420b_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6027/5950141756_d6a1620573_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6028/5949583735_7f6a43e480_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6024/5950140702_8fa14cedeb_b.jpg

Building bases needed a bit of tweaking to follow the ground.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6136/5949581911_d146c289d3_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6128/5949582747_d691fbbfb2_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6125/5950139498_41082c06f6_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6123/5950140284_0112f970ef_b.jpg

Also in general, I've knocked most of the displacements down to lower powers, for most areas, it doesn't make much difference

shotgunefx

07-18-2011, 03:07 PM

So need some opinions on fences...

The stock chainlink fences actually work pretty well as far as aligning them to hilly terrain and not having them look weird where they meet.

The wasteland hl2, fences, not quite so much as they have posts on both sides of the models. I think I may decompile these and replace them with a version that only has a post on one end, but still as is, look ok.

My real quandry are the wood fences. Take these pics from a yard that has had it's fences adjusted (I used setang_exact for these screenshots to really show the slope)

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6010/5952272290_26c113afce_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6024/5952272482_9042cd9e42_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6007/5951718635_8d8ea9d10e_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6025/5951718787_058795ab63_b.jpg

Do you think these look ok?

Keep in mind, this is one of the worst areas in this regards, a lot of elevation change in a small area. I don't think they look terrible or anything, but in general, wood fences may follow the elevation but they generally have the posts and slats upright but sheared horizontally.

I had a couple thoughts. One, I could make 3 versions of these models sheared at 1, 2 and 3 degrees, or just make them func_detail which would be the easiest way. I don't think there's going to be a lot of these in the map, and tweaking all those models feels like a lot of work for the return.

Here's what I meant about the wasteland models and posts. I still think it looks pretty good though.
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6026/5952272982_c789e88075_b.jpg

Okami Amaterasu

07-19-2011, 09:09 PM

shotgunefx

07-19-2011, 09:31 PM

In that last picture, the barb wire doesn't make sense. It's facing outward on one fence, then inward on the other. It looks really bad in my opinion. Also the bottom looks like it's floating? Besides that; it looks great so far. I use SketchUp too, and there are a few tools I don't know how to use I would like to figure out how to use, but besides that it is pretty good for my needs.

Funny you should mention that. The backwards fence has been gnawing at me as well. I think I did that originally to indicate to the player, a boundary. You can get over the fence, just not that way and to see from the viewpoint of the last shot, you'd have to walk all the way around. But yeah, it looks bad.

As far as floating, it's actually not. The tools I made default to really high light map scales. Once I go through and touch up and turn em down, the shadows will probably make it look less so.

In other news, blend texture blend textures blend textures. What a pita. For the very large open industrial areas, I had to make a bunch and a lot of the ones I wanted to use didn't have bumps, so I had to make those. I tried SSBump_Generator with terrible results. Probably doing something wrong but could not for the life of me get anything usable out of it with a heightmap. Greyscaling in photoshop and pasting it into the alpha and running it through height2ssbump was much better

Still a ton more to do though

Okami Amaterasu

07-19-2011, 09:42 PM

I see. Okay then. If I knew how to do anything that would be helpful, I would offer to help you, but I don't think I can do anything.

shotgunefx

07-19-2011, 09:47 PM

Now I remember why I had those sections pointing inwards, to ease infected ladders, still gonna change it though.

shotgunefx

07-19-2011, 10:39 PM

I see. Okay then. If I knew how to do anything that would be helpful, I would offer to help you, but I don't think I can do anything.

I appreciate that. It's one of those projects that doesn't lend itself to spreading the load unfortunately.

Though just noticed something funny. I look at street view (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=881+summer+st+02127&ll=42.338175,-71.033788&spn=0.000728,0.001938&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&gl=us&t=h&z=20&layer=c&cbll=42.338171,-71.033788&panoid=9avpO0XeJvoy27bUJg2XOQ&cbp=12,144.66,,1,-0.63) for that building, and the all do indeed have the razor wire fencetops facing inwards, not outwards. Weird, seems you'd want it the other way, so technically that segment of fence was the only one that was correct.

Okami Amaterasu

07-20-2011, 12:44 AM

Ah, so it is... Man, that is weird! This project is going really well from the looks of it, anyway.

shotgunefx

07-21-2011, 12:55 PM

Ah, so it is... Man, that is weird! This project is going really well from the looks of it, anyway.

Thanks. Well it was certainly going, but of course, I've now just hit a wall :mad:

So I add a few more of the blocks, put the rest of the old geometry in place and compiles fine, then I add the park back in and....

Brush 154: ParseDispInfoChunk: nummapdispinfo > MAX_MAP_DISPINFO

Grrrr. This one snuck up on me, for some reason, dispinfo,disp_verts and disp_tris all show maxs and fullness as 0%, of course until you hit it which is 2048.

So I went to one of my more complicated blocks, a lot of curb cuts for driveways and added a counter, to my surprise....

573 displacements. :eek: (the entire giant park with walkways is less then half of that). The corners and curbcuts are what make it shoot up there. (cuts more so). A corner takes 11 displacements. 44 per block, not so bad, the curb cuts take 16 displacements each, and if there are 5 driveways on a block, BAM 140 displacements right there.

So now I need to do some thinking. To me, losing the terrain is out of the question. I won't even be able to approximate the location with brushwork, and while I can make some sacrifices (and have), that's too much. I'd rather just finish the final map and ship it as a survival map or something.

So that's out.

Possible solutions.

#1- Make the sidewalks all models.
Pros-: easy
Cons-: lighting will suck hard.

#2- Make the outer curbs models, leave the sidewalks and inner all displacement.
Pros-: somewhat easy, I just need to add a little bit of code, then export it out again in sketchup as an SMD (or even just export it as is and use propper)

Off that 573 count, removing the curbs will knock it down to under 300, and realistically, out of those remaining 300, most only exist to mate to all those curb cuts and sew, so probably could get it down to well under 100 each, which is a much more usable figure. I could also make the curbs and corners much more detailed. I'd just split each block into 4 or so models based on quadrant. And there would also be a lot less tri's because the sides don't need all that detail.

This would bring corners down from 11 displacements to 3, and driveway curbs from 16 to 1.

#3 - Make better displacements. Instead of separating the curbs from the sidewalk, I make it one and use a combo texture. For the corners, they become 1 or 2 displacements instead in the shape of a trapezoid and I project them outwards radially to make the corners. But the texture stretching will look lousy I think. Originally, this is how I was doing it. Seamless scale might fix it, but I wasn't impressed with my experiments with it. Originally, this is how I did it (except I made the corners by hand).

Pros: - don't know, don't think it will look so great.

Cons: - writing the software to do the curves will suck.

So I guess I'm leaning towards #2. All in all, I'm almost ready for a break for a couple weeks. Just so frustrating when I hit a stride to keep hitting some issue or other.

Anyway, some pics..

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6145/5961352395_768581240e_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6138/5961352865_ea44e1c249_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6145/5961909286_8fb97fbb85_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6146/5961353741_37a43eb771_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6013/5961909640_ea674446be_b.jpg

Okami Amaterasu

07-21-2011, 01:54 PM

HellaLouYaah

07-21-2011, 01:57 PM

I would go with option #2 also. Since the lighting will not match quite, I wonder if you changed the material slightly by adding $color to it's material file to adjust the overall tint/shading. Not sure if possible, but adding an illumposition just above the model might help too.

shotgunefx

07-21-2011, 02:22 PM

Okay, this may be a stupid question, but what is a displacement? I am not savvy to mapping for Source games, just Ocarina of Time for the N64. They look good so far, though. If these displacements are things in SketchUp them maybe I could use them in OoT maps, that might be cool...

Displacements are a Source feature. Basically you can create a mesh on a brush face. You can read more here.

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Displacements

Sketchup has something similar called TINs but they aren't usable in Source and there is no way to generate them from it without writing you're own software, which is what I did. I made some fairly limited specific tools for this campaign which eventually will see a release in some form or another.

I would go with option #2 also. Since the lighting will not match quite, I wonder if you changed the material slightly by adding $color to it's material file to adjust the overall tint/shading. Not sure if possible, but adding an illumposition just above the model might help too.

I'm not terribly worried about the lighting for just curbs. I don't think it will look so bad and in IRL the curbs look like a separate entity from the sidewalk. Will see though when I actually get one in game how it looks. They already have a separate material as well. The other issue is when the displacements get big, the lightmap scale automatically gets lowered.

I wouldn't be surprised if I had to tweak the $illumposition. Also I need to figure out where to center them. Ideally, I'd have the origins at 0,0,0 for easy placement, but I wonder if that will affect the clipping or not. I'll also have to make collision models which shouldn't be too bad. I guess I'll just project the top face away from the normal, that should give me a convex segment.

Maybe all in all this will be a good thing, because the way I'm mapping now, I'm really treating the curbs as the world more or less and the streets as things that connect them. By simplifying the displacements and mostly removing the need to sew with these complicated features, I can do most of my clipping up in Hammer along geometry lines as I see fit which will speed things up tremendously.

The other thing is that those curb displacements, pretty much all the in-between vertices on a side were a waste. Really just need a face from top to bottom as the middle isn't displaced at all.

I will say thank goodness for Sketchup. If these weren't problems I could mostly fix in software and just re-export, I would just quit rather than do all this effort again.

shotgunefx

07-23-2011, 07:41 PM

So made a bit of headway on generating the curb models.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6020/5968351689_0377f5b47a_b.jpg

Still needs some work. I need to mimic the displacements for a variety of reasons but I'm going to mix it up a bit. I added what would be a POW 1 (9 faces vs POW2's 25), because most of these smaller faces don't need so many polys.

Next, I'm going to split it so the power will be based on size automatically and also capable of having different "pow"'s on each axis. That way it should still match closely with the displacements but I can keep the polygon count reasonable. I also think if a face is less than ~80 square units, I'll reduce it to simply two (or four triangles).

Then I just need to figure out what I want to do for collisions. One options would be do nothing at all. Just take the sidewalks out another 7 or eight units, so they float under the model providing the collisions. This really won't work for corners though. But I suppose I could manually add clips to them and have it be close enough.

Pictured are all POW1, right now I can paint it with materials pow1,pow2,etc to control it, but figure I'll just wait until I code it in, then hopefully it looks good ingame.

shotgunefx

07-24-2011, 02:46 PM

A little closer. Did a quick test. I've got the adaptive sampling down, or good enough anyway. I left the lightmapped curbs in place for comparison.

Lighting wise, pretty close.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6011/5971863654_a31624d6b0_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6139/5971864224_78e0f97e4c_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6009/5971862702_4a931951a5_b.jpg

One thing I'm going to need to work on is the texturing. Sketchup's (and my own plugin) are not doing a good job mapping the texture to the faces and they get confused easily.

I don't think automating to align to the faces will be so terrible, but what's gonna be tricker is having them align across boundaries. I guess I'll just have to pick a brush and expand out from there, but that's going to require a bit more bookkeeping

HellaLouYaah

07-24-2011, 04:43 PM

The lighting looks way better than I thought it would, awesome. Kind of thought maybe they would be more point-sampled looking(?), but the light seems to fade right

shotgunefx

07-24-2011, 05:13 PM

The lighting looks way better than I thought it would, awesome. Kind of thought maybe they would be more point-sampled looking(?), but the light seems to fade right

Much better than I thought too. While across the curb (inner to outer) is about 3 vertices, which is pretty dense for 8 units, some of them are quite long. In the picture by the car, those triangles are around 70 units long, so I was afraid they vertex lighting might show but looks pretty good. I may run into issues in other areas, won't know until I know, but all in all, certainly looks decent, which is good because this was a show stopper.

Total poly count is about 1876 for that block. Not too bad, The curbs actually have a back side, which if I remove I could lose a couple hundred more but I may leave them, depends on how seamless the transition is and if there's any gap going to be visible between the mdl and the displacement curb.

I plan on splitting each block into 4 models based on quadrant and using fade distance to control visibility. Now as far as savings, this particular model replaces 217 displacements.

Pretty good savings right there, so I'm guessing I'll knock off about 1000 displacements off the budget of what I have at the moment. But now that it will simplify the internal block, I'm guessing close to 1200-1500 which means plenty of room.

I wonder performance wise what the impact will be. I'm guessing faster. The lowest number of faces a displacement can have is 25. I'm not sure if the engine merges co-linear faces but ballpark, displacement wise, talking 5425 triangles for the displacement version (25 * 217, but actually some are pow3), vs 1876 and I imagine simple vertex materials are cheaper than simple lightmapped materials, though I could be wrong.

shotgunefx

07-24-2011, 05:26 PM

Here's some pics with the model actually in place (well almost, off by a fraction of a unit)

Curb on the left mdl, curb on right, displacement. Lighting looks pretty damn good.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6013/5972404366_69c7c62e50_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6014/5971846259_6ee34e9c6e_b.jpg

The vertex lighting is a little bit more noticeable here but I can live with it.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6011/5971846023_54531de393_b.jpg

This may be a bigger issue. I'm guessing it's not receiving shadows as it doesn't have a collision model.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6141/5972404138_fcc60f1186_b.jpg

If I can use the displacement to act as it, I'd rather do that. I'll have to try making a shrinkwrap one for it but disabling it being solid and see if it receives shadows then.

shotgunefx

08-02-2011, 04:47 PM

A little update as I've been rather quiet.

Basically I got pretty jarateed of with Sketchup and trying to texture the curb models. I suppose I could have just took out those for the moment and just worked on the map and sidewalks and came back to it, but all in all, the fun factor was just gone so I took a break.

Anyway, I came back to it today and like many complex problems after some rest, resolution came pretty quick (mostly).

Turns out the documentation for positioning material in Sketchup is ridiculously incomplete.

You can pass 2,4,6 or 8 pairs of a 3D point, and a 2D UV. Ok, that makes some sort of sense. You pass one pair, you figure origin, 2 pairs, it calcs scale and alignment, etc. Not that it tell you any of this, but I digress...

And it does kind of work like that, but it doesn't. I could get it to almost appear to work but was hard to tell as my 128" textures were being repeated thousands of times (enough to appear as a solid color).

Finally found this post (http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=14611&start=0) which shed some light.

But they neglect to tell you (or it's not easily found) that UVs are in material units (even though materials HAVE to have dimensions).

So TX = 1 in a material is the right most UV column. So now I'm mostly back on track. I just have to add one more step. Basically I need to pick a curb, and work outwards from their propagating the start and ending texel coords so all the textures align nicely.

I can't wait to get back to fun stuff, ie mapping , because this feels too much like work

shotgunefx

08-08-2011, 04:11 PM

Finally!, almost back on track, after much more avoidance, I finally sat down today and was able to solve the texturing relatively easily.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6127/6023298605_dc0d7c7541_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6068/6023856150_e71b765db3_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6147/6023855158_928397794b_b.jpg

Works pretty great. Only place it fails (or rather looks bad) is the driveway curb cuts, but that's fine because they need a different texture anyway.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6121/6023856544_15c5a53e8f_b.jpg

Still a couple things to clean up.

1) I need to fix it so the model is exported in the right orientation.

2) I need to figure out what to do about collisions. Generating the collision model will be actually pretty easy, though I could just extend the displacement sidewalk out 8 units all around. Might visually glitch ever so slightly at the corners (especially if I make the corners "nicer ie more round) but I don't know if I care or not. I also don't know what's better engine wise. I'm guessing having the models not solid. Though it makes my Sketchup files a bit more complicated so I'm not sure yet.

3) I'm going to add a special case for small faces based on area and length. As I'm mimicking how displacements are made, even with my fake POW1, still some of the small faces have 8 polygons when they could just as easily have 2 and look just as good. That'll knock 100-300 polys off each block.

shotgunefx

08-09-2011, 12:55 AM

One more update while I'm at it.

So much closer now. I've added the reduction code for small faces, so now , the curb models for a block are between 1,000-1,200 polys. (down from near 2K) I could probably go a bit lower if I tweak the auto resolutions a bit. I may experiment with this a bit to see how low I can go and still have it approximate the curb displacements adequately.

But split into 4 sub models, not so bad (250-400 polys, ~ 4 visible at a time). Also not too bad considering each block model is about a 1/4 mile of curb.

Also at the same time, I made the corners, etc smoother, so they look less blocky.

It's easy to "tuck-in" the displacement corner under the curve without much apparent texture stretching, so that's good. But still not receiving dynamic shadows, I'll have to look into that a bit more. While I'm at it, I think I'll have it reset the UV position for short segments, so basically the curb seams will match up with the edges of the polygons. IRL, these pieces are actually curved, but I think I'd rather have consistent seams, rather than them be placed willy-nilly.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6125/6025124624_3f50d776ba_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6198/6025124404_b376526fc2_b.jpg

Looking at the model as a whole, the lighting looks pretty great all around and blends pretty nicely with the lightmaps.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6150/6024568707_49394b9174_b.jpg

Oh and the block's displacement count goes from around 580 to about 80-90, so plenty of room again.

Though there is one thing that's a bit annoying, and it's not a dead in the water issue and I can easily work past it, but I'd like to find the cause.

The model doesn't quite match up to the displacement terrain, it's like the model has been scaled by 1.0001 or something. I'm about a unit short so there's a tiny gap between the inner curb, and the sidewalk. I know it's not the displacement as I'm writing those files, and I know it's not the code that makes the curb model as it's just a modified version of the displacement writer.

So it's got to be something in the SMD exporter, perhaps some specific rounding they are doing, or even maybe how vertices are calculated from brush sides.

shotgunefx

08-09-2011, 04:23 PM

So I thought my problem with not receiving shadows was something to do with the collision. So I patched the code to generate a nice collision model and... no go.

So I went to the wiki and see this....

Dynamic Shadows are cast only by world models (NPCs, phys-props, etc), and only onto brush surfaces (from both Static and Dynamic light sources). They are calculated at runtime, so they are quite crude and relatively expensive to render.

So apparently it's just not possible, how I didn't know this by now, I dunno. I could make them dynamic models, but that would be expensive and the lighting goes back to being terrible. Seeing not having a curb is not an option, nor is cutting the scale down so much as to make displacement curbs viable, I guess I'll just have to live with it and light around it as much as possible.

shotgunefx

08-11-2011, 01:42 PM

So still plugging away, curbs, aren't they fascinating? :rolleyes:

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6089/6032838229_9dd365a309_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6066/6032837907_aa73fe7c79_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6069/6033395892_73db34f8e4_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6090/6033434504_d92c378a47_b.jpg

Overall, it looks pretty good, the lighting looks nice, but there are some things to be wary off...

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6081/6032877383_324093d489_b.jpg

So for areas with complex shadows, I could just hide it under a static_prop, but what I'll probably end up doing is just adding some faces to get a better looking result.

Still having some issues with alignment that are really jarateing me off.

Basically the SMD exporter uses the component's origin and axis to determine it's orientation. So they need to be adjusted, found a plugin and modified that to do what I want and spit out the actually coordinates (so I can start the prop at (0,0,0) and translate it into position. (Also the models are always off by 270 compared to world space, but a simple $origin in the qc fixes that).

So now they align PERFECTLY on X & Y, but for some reason not Z. So annoying when I clip up the blocks into quads.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6190/6033394580_501c9ff426_b.jpg

So take this seam, after some minor futzing in Hammer, I can get it pretty close, but not perfect. I don't know if I really care at this point. Most blocks have naturally breaks near enough so I could split them and not worry about it, but it's very annoying.

It's also annoying to have to generate and 8 models for every block (quadrants and the quadrant collision model).

Also while I'm at it, I'm carving up the interior displacements much more to remove as much overdraw (and luxels) as I can, also most of em came down a pow. That was pretty easy but annoying having to alpha-paint everything again.

edit

About 5 minutes after posting on Sketchucation, problem with alignment solved. Everything lines up perfectly.

Okami Amaterasu

08-11-2011, 06:49 PM

They are looking good. Possibly better that curbs I could model, I dunno. Also I'll assume the rest is good news.

shotgunefx

08-11-2011, 07:07 PM

They are looking good. Possibly better that curbs I could model, I dunno. Also I'll assume the rest is good news.

Mostly good. I'm getting the work flow as streamlined as possible, though still a PITA compared to just using displacements but now it's just tedious instead of almost impossible.

Though we'll see how it goes when I get to the park again. I was going to steal 128 units from one side of it to make some room so I could keep everything geo-referenced, it'll be a much bigger pain with the model curbs, though I suppose for that one side, I could keep them displacements so I can just scale them in Hammer.

Also quite a drag to have to do so much stuff over, I just want to be making new stuff.

turistas

08-12-2011, 07:32 AM

Mostly good. I'm getting the work flow as streamlined as possible, though still a PITA compared to just using displacements but now it's just tedious instead of almost impossible.

Though we'll see how it goes when I get to the park again. I was going to steal 128 units from one side of it to make some room so I could keep everything geo-referenced, it'll be a much bigger pain with the model curbs, though I suppose for that one side, I could keep them displacements so I can just scale them in Hammer.

Also quite a drag to have to do so much stuff over, I just want to be making new stuff.

yea, thats a disappointing, but keep at it, it will turn out great.

shotgunefx

08-12-2011, 04:17 PM

yea, thats a disappointing, but keep at it, it will turn out great.

Yeah, total pain.

So it turns out I had a bit more work to do. The auto texturing would be reversed in some cases. The first few models, only a handful and it's simply a matter of rotating the tex 180, but then on some other shapes, it would be far far worse, also, if I had to rexport the model for some reason, I had to touch it up again and it was apparent I had to track that down.

So finally got that squashed and now the texturing is perfect and the speed at which I'm able to crank them out is getting about optimal. Previously I had to visual inspect all of the texturing before blowing it out into 3D and each curb is a bout a 1/4 mile, so glad that's over with.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6084/6036845022_23e005fc42_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6202/6036843176_095e479e88_b.jpg

For the most part, the lighting except for the lack of dynamic shadows is great.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6125/6036842134_a21112164f_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6201/6036843024_994d3da2c7_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6202/6036843176_095e479e88_b.jpg

BUT there are still a few warts I'll have to work around...

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6129/6036287971_0e87ab4bc5_b.jpg

(notice the dark spot) I'm surprised that's the only issue with vertex lighting so far.
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6088/6036288295_2f36645953_b.jpg

I suppose for the area with the dense tree shadows, and even the fire barrel, I could just export those little segments as displacements as before and plop em a fraction above, I probably will do just that.

So hopefully with the next update, I'll have some pics of something new that isn't about curbs ;)

HellaLouYaah

08-12-2011, 05:21 PM

I can't believe still how good they turned out. For those little "problem" areas, it's barely noticable, especially when you have debris/cars etc scattered about.

shotgunefx

08-12-2011, 06:22 PM

I can't believe still how good they turned out. For those little "problem" areas, it's barely noticable, especially when you have debris/cars etc scattered about.

Thanks! They better for all the work they took ;). I actually just wrapped up the last existing curb model.

One thing that I kind of want to fix now, but probably won't are a few errant visual alignments. It doesn't detect in all cases where it thinks it should reset like so..

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6128/6037122500_f12f62b83d_b.jpg

I mean it's as easy as opening up the model in KHED (or whatever) and selecting the corner (or cut) and simply dragging the UV's left or right, and I probably will do a pass at it in the future, but for now, I'm sick of curbs so I'm going to leave it until later.

Next on the plate will be refactoring the displacements I already made as the sewing requirements are far simpler. Then onto building new blocks, you know with new stuff on em :)

Not sure if I'm going to go East or West first. I mean the park is already mostly done, so I may just continue East, but I'd really like to start on the power grid and waterfront area too.

Keldorn

08-13-2011, 03:01 AM

So for areas with complex shadows, I could just hide it under a static_prop, but what I'll probably end up doing is just adding some faces to get a better looking result.

I wouldn't really bother too much with the lighting on your curb models. Most People don't know how the engine works and probably would never notice. I think most people by now play source games because there fun not for graphics whoring since source all around looks outdated anyways. lol

shotgunefx

08-13-2011, 02:17 PM

I wouldn't really bother too much with the lighting on your curb models. Most People don't know how the engine works and probably would never notice. I think most people by now play source games because there fun not for graphics whoring since source all around looks outdated anyways. lol

True, also given the nature of the models, added faces doesn't do much to improve the lighting besides increase overhead.

On another note, I did a quick proof of concept with "unsquashing" the park to steal a 128 units. Luckily it worked pretty well and will allow me not to have to screw around with terrain data. I'll have to do a little massaging in Hammer, but not much.

Squashing and unsquashing the curb model almost works, it looks great in Sketchup, but the corners export weird UV-wise so I am just going to stick with displacements for the curbs on that side of the park, It's not that many. Though I'm going to have to re-export the paths through the park, it was done with an older version of the curb generator that spit out sides going all the way down to the base, which is a bunch of extra luxels, but luckily, that will only take a few minutes to redo. So looks like I'm going to continue east.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6202/6038990273_5699dd38b8_b.jpg

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6072/6039540570_c199d3bea2_b.jpg

Not to go too OT, but what you were saying about Source, I watched a video the other day on the artwork of RAGE, and how they can just paint on the world however they want, so jealous...