New SH (KC-tex) shots (090916)

[LDAsh]

Here are a couple of small shots featuring some new media contributed by KC Clark along with some other new bits and pieces the team has recently acquired. Please note both of these scenes were created extremely quickly. These shots focus mainly on this new media and have been challenging to create using such limited resources, so they are more like examples, just some practice mapping for now, but it helps refine the new media and determine what to pursue the creation of next. In the process we've discovered an innovative new way to quickly create massive amounts of small optimised randomly-formed rock objects that consume just 1 entity count in a map, using minimal amount of triangles to create many objects, as you may or may not be able to see in the second shot, but will definitely be a technique used often from now on as we focus on creating more organic environments, mostly using completely original material unique to the team.

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[EmoLevelDesigner]

These look like some mysterious places of unknown origin and purpose. The design is very detailed and stylish, and lighting creates nice atmosphere.

In the process we've discovered an innovative new way to quickly create massive amounts of small optimised randomly-formed rock objects that consume just 1 entity count in a map, using minimal amount of triangles to create many objects

That's really cool, it should make rock placement quick and fun. From my experience of creating rock formations, there's no creativity involved, the designer just has to make something as shapeless as possible and that's all. So automating this process is an excellent idea.

[LDAsh]

This basically involved ripping the geometry from the viewport, whether they were brushes or mapobjects, and quickly welding, adding smoothing groups, redoing UV layouts and then importing it all back in as 1 mapobject, mainly for the purpose of performance. These days it doesn't really apply to the engine I'm using now but back when using Quake IV, I thought it was a pretty big deal, especially for random brushwork that otherwise would have looked faceted and badly textured. I could very quickly get smooth results that actually performed good.

In retrospect, I think these map shots are pretty bad. I remember doing them up in just a few hours and it shows.

[EmoLevelDesigner]

So, if I understand correctly, the technology just shuffles existing objects? That's disappointing, I thought it can create new rock formations from scratch. Still could help, though, if you create a massive library of objects for it to use.

I don't think that these shots look bad, and the fact that these places were created in a few hours only makes them more stunning for me.

Speaking of Shadowing Hate screenshots, I said "Wow!" when I saw clean design and atmospheric lighting of these places:
http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/4/ ... 0519_a.jpg
http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/4/ ... 0519_b.jpg

[LDAsh]

So, if I understand correctly, the technology just shuffles existing objects? That's disappointing, I thought it can create new rock formations from scratch.

Somewhere in between these two, I think. It allows fairly lazy and ragged brushwork details to be smoothed out, optimised, retextured and imported back into the map as 1 mapobject, looking and performing much better than it otherwise would. The major downside is that if a mapper wants to change some things around, the entire process needs to be done again. These days, the new engine we're using kind of has these tools built into it already, so it's much easier and quicker.

Speaking of Shadowing Hate screenshots, I said "Wow!" when I saw clean design and atmospheric lighting of these places

I agree! These were done by DeeP, a new but incredibly talented mapper who disappeared from the team shortly after doing these. At the time, I thought they were over-detailed and it made me worried I'd need to tuck them into a corner somewhere, but visually they really hold up nicey and I wish DeeP would appear again and do more kick-ass work like this. I think he'd really be in his element given what we can do these days, going nuts with details and managing everything with LOD and other optimising tricks we never had before when using the idTech engines.

DeeP, if you read this, you are very missed!