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At 1/5/10 11:02 AM, havegum wrote: Wow!
I didn't know it was that much work with the textures!

Which is why I'm the dedicated texture artist on the team and why it took us 5 months to not even get it finished xD.
But we learned a shitload, that's all that matters.

Hello.

Tracers!

1920x1200 version.

Also the high res of the last one I forgot to include...

WIP government building.

High res for great justice.

Semester's finished, now it's point getting time. Early impressions from peers are exceptionally positive, including from the people who will assess the project.

We've also made a showcase vid which I'll upload on the 25th to Youtube. The 25th being the date we present it to the rest of the 3D minor.
Wouldn't want to spoil it of course ;)

But since none of you are nowhere near Leeuwarden, the Netherlands I can show you pics :)

Art portal submission here.

Art portal entry here.

At 1/21/10 09:47 AM, havegum wrote: I like the moody glow from the signs!
And I love how the sky changes from dark to light

Also, the showcase vid is on youtube?

Link please? :3

Listen to Jonny ;)

Thanks for the comments! The vid will show everything in motion, including the hologram effects, the smoke, tracers and stuff :D

'Nother picture, art portal entry here.

And another, Art Portal here..

I'm also going to make a longer vid chronicling the evolution of our level, similar to the one from a few pages back (or maybe last page...).
This will also be uploaded on the 25th.

The Lamppost.

The Street.

hey just a question, why didnt you make the trees and grass yourself?
would that really have been that much extra work, extra time? im asking cause I find it a bit of a shame that you have to say "Everything except the trees in the middle and the grass are custom."

At 1/21/10 11:23 AM, J-qb wrote: hey just a question, why didnt you make the trees and grass yourself?
would that really have been that much extra work, extra time? im asking cause I find it a bit of a shame that you have to say "Everything except the trees in the middle and the grass are custom."

The trees were placeholders at first and we were like 'yeah, we'll fill those in later with custom stuff'.
That didn't quite happen, as it soon became clear just how much work everything else was, so it was pushed down the priority list and eventually ended up not being replaced at all.

The grass is actually generated by the Editor itself using the Foliage Factory, which is a bitch to use as it tends to crash the Editor altogether when you try to copy the grass volume or even move it.
So we decided not to screw around with it too much xD.

There are even more pics on my artpage for those of you interested.

Like this one.

The final video, now available on Youtube in 720p.

A job well one, I hope your mentor likes it. Personally I still feel that the hi-tech subway areas were way too sharp contrast and looked bland, but oh well, there's always the street level.

Out of curiosity, why did the map not play well? I'm guessing that the vehicles didn't really have any movement room in your vCTF (lol), but what else?

Thanks jonny :)

At 1/25/10 03:41 PM, Re2deemer wrote: A job well one, I hope your mentor likes it. Personally I still feel that the hi-tech subway areas were way too sharp contrast and looked bland, but oh well, there's always the street level.

I think that has to do because the subway is the first part that was finished in the first few months. We completely overhauled our workflow after that when we hit a few err... bumps and started focusing on the street level, seeing how much work that really was. After we had the big chunks filled in we would delve deeper and implement things like a hover highway in the sky, more high tech buildings, more holograms, the lot. But we sort of finished the big chunks about a week before the deadline, so that didn't really happen... ever.

To elaborate: during the build of the subway we sort of had a democratic way of implementing features. Everyone had a say in everything, the design of the trashcan, its colours, material, etcetera.
That's fine if you have ten months and highly skilled people, not five months and a collection of students new to Unreal.

So afterwards we really divided the team into modellers, texture artist (me :D), level artist and so on, which sped up production... a damn lot.
Had we known when we started out, we probably would have done a lot of things wrong still, but it would look nicer.
But we didn't and it took us this project to find out.

And yes, they like it. I like it too :)

Out of curiosity, why did the map not play well? I'm guessing that the vehicles didn't really have any movement room in your vCTF (lol), but what else?

Performance, basically. The level contains a ton of highly detailed models and we were stupid to enough to include one big street overlooking most of said models. The engine and computers do not like ~1 million triangles on the screen at once.
We should've put in some destroyed vehicles or something which would occlude the more complex models so that all those triangles wouldn't be rendered all at once.

And that's basically why so few games contain large and highly detailed open plains without any hills or mountains.
That's another thing we learned.

Oh, and it's also vCTF because the level contains a lot of long straights, so vCTF allowed the player to use a hoverboard to quickly go back to his base if he grabbed the flag.

At 1/25/10 04:14 PM, havegum wrote: Is the street just a texture? or is there some sort of rough surface on it?
It looks awesome either way!

The asphalt is just a texture yes, but to prevent tiling we used a technique in the Unreal Editor which blends it with other textures. It doesn't have a normal map I think, but maybe it has a normal map generated by the blending process.

Congrats on finishing! What will you be doing now?

A first person adventure game build with the Unreal Development Kit set in the Himalayas.
I'm leading the project, first time I'm actually doing something like that so I'm nervous. But it will involve a lot more gamedesign so it's right up my alley.
Most of the team from this project (Future London) will be working on that, along with four others. Two of which also have experience working with Unreal, so chances are it's going to be a good project.

I'm really hoping to see some sort of demo or video of you walking around in this little world you are creating. It'd be a shame not to get the full feel of this place.

The Making of Video, also on Youtube.

At 1/25/10 04:52 PM, M-Vero wrote: I'm really hoping to see some sort of demo or video of you walking around in this little world you are creating. It'd be a shame not to get the full feel of this place.

I think I'll get some sleep first, but I'll see what I can do.

At 1/25/10 04:54 PM, RNNR wrote: The Making of Video, also on Youtube.

ask and you shall receive.

Top notch work, grats to all involved, even if some stuff was left out, the final product looks fantastic.
Very professional.

See no time long.

@ Art Portal.

At 5/31/10 01:10 PM, RNNR wrote: See no time long.

@ Art Portal.

indeed, good to see you back, it looks awesome but with 3d work its hard to tell whats hard and whats easy

At 5/31/10 01:17 PM, Ashman wrote: indeed, good to see you back, it looks awesome but with 3d work its hard to tell whats hard and whats easy

Opening up the program and finding the 'Make it look AWESOME' button is definitely the hardest part.

At 5/31/10 01:27 PM, RNNR wrote:

At 5/31/10 01:17 PM, Ashman wrote: indeed, good to see you back, it looks awesome but with 3d work its hard to tell whats hard and whats easy

Opening up the program and finding the 'Make it look AWESOME' button is definitely the hardest part.

i feel like a dumbass now, great job there, you can tell i know nothing about 3d work

Good thing it's right in front of your face in photoshop or I'd be screwed

At 5/31/10 01:38 PM, Ashman wrote: i feel like a dumbass now, great job there, you can tell i know nothing about 3d work

Ah, don't be. I'm just pulling your leg :p

Terragen 2 has more to do with math than with polygons, really.
It can be somewhat divided in 4 parts: terrain, atmosphere, lighting and water. Though water is optional.

Based on fractals defined by the user Terragen can generate the basic terrain, allowing control over things like scale, roughness, displacement and the like. It's also possible to import data from actual, real terrain. You can also import any 3D object, like trees, cars, buildings etc.

Colours are applied through shaders which are 'layered' on top. Users can then control at what slope angle or height grass (for instance) is or isn't applied and how thick the coverage is.
The colour itself can be chosen (of course) and its contrast etc can then be adjusted. You can also 'tell' what colour should be displayed at what height and adjust luminosity.

'Seeland' uses three different shaders: one for the red rock layer, one for the grass and an additional one for patches of dirt which are only visible in depressions in the terrain.
It also has a fake stone shader which places rocks and the like in the environment.

Atmosphere likewise makes use of fractals to generate clouds, with the possibility to create any type of cloud from Cumulus (low level, thick rainclouds) to Cirrus (high level streaks).
Cloud density, colour, depth, altitude, coverage, light scattering can all be adjusted to the user's liking.

The colour of the sky, haze, redsky decay are likewise adjustable.

The lightsource is basically the sun. Elevation, heading, effect on atmosphere, colour, specular highlights, all can be tweaked.

I tend to stay away from water, since it usually results in insane rendering times. As all lightrays emitted by the lightsource bounce of every single wave and then bounces off every wave in the vicinity of said waves, which then bounce off the environment and the clouds above and...
it involves a lot of brute force and ~20 hour rendering times aren't the exception.

But basically every single feature you can think of when it comes to water can be changed in various ways.

So... yeah, that's Terragen 2 in a nutshell. There's also a load of camera controls, the ability to animate and beautiful things like Global Illumination and subsurface scattering and a load of plug-ins, but I think you got the jist of it.