The WIP Thread

[esselfortium]

Essel, does it come with years of practice or a natural talent? I think I make decent looking maps but my terrain doesn't look nearly as nice as yours.

When it comes to terrain, I think it just mainly takes a lot of patience to build stuff, look at it and see if any of it looks grossly unnatural, see if it's varied enough to look interesting (i.e. hills and mountains generally shouldn't all reach the same height when they meet the sky, or no amount of interesting terrain inside the map itself will keep them from being rather flat), and sometimes end up redoing stuff a bunch of times until you're at least happy enough with it to not feel like messing with it any more for a while.

I think it was Espi who once told me that building natural terrain was mostly an exercise in patience, and I'd more or less agree with that. Once you get the basic concepts down, whether it be sloped rocks or flat curvy layers or whatever else, it's just a matter of being willing to put absolutely absurd amounts of time into it, and keep trying again and again until the scene looks how you want it to.

With that said, I have been following your guides on making natural terrain with slopes and avoiding auto-align abuse and I'm glad to say my aesthetics have improved greatly, so I'd like to thank you for that.

Thanks! I'm glad you've found them helpful. I've actually got a new, pretty comprehensive set of mapping articles in progress, that I started writing for a class this semester. Stuff I've written so far is "moving beyond rooms," "height variation," "loops," "dynamic space," "textures as materials," and "material layering." I've tried to keep it as general and straightforward as possible, referencing existing well-known maps to explain concepts and demonstrating some ways that they can be applied and the benefits of them, rather than doing tutorial stuff. Doom e1 levels are used for some of the examples in all of the layout-related articles. There's a bunch more I'd like to write, plus there's at least one project referenced for examples that hasn't been officially announced yet...>_>

Watch this space

Hey now, don't try to pin this one on me. I'm outspoken about flat square rooms, obnoxious floor height changes, alignment cutoffs, and mismatched 2mbrown usage.

Ah yes - but in the grander scheme of things, many a mapper does aspire to make maps that look (just) like yours do Hell, even I've found myself thinking "would essel approve?" and I'd like to think I'm good at forging my own style.

Forging your own style is absolutely not incompatible with Essel approving; quite the opposite in fact

[Bashe]

Some weird, fucked up things I made by screwing around in Goldwave. The Kirby at the end of each is an anti-cutoff measure; please ignore it.

[DoomRater]

Wooo, i'm totally showing that ReDead Factory to the Zelda group I'm with.

I've been helping out with the mask project, and while it's coming along and getting better, I think the masks are being made too thick in most areas. It's probably benefit from some bumping instead of just bineg altogether thick, then the emotion will show through a lot better (and make the masks weigh less, less chance of slipping).

[Woolie Wool]

Honestly, the lava looks more like molten cheddar than lava.

It actually looked to me more like piss.

[Enjay]

I can't work out if pissing melted cheese would be a good thing or a bad thing.

[Gez]

Honestly, the lava looks more like molten cheddar than lava.

It actually looked to me more like piss.

[NeuralStunner]

I can't work out if pissing melted cheese would be a good thing or a bad thing.

I do know one thing, I'm never dropping by your place for nachos.

[Demolisher]

Why does that house have two windows on top of each other on the same level in the bathroom?

[Gez]

It's two separate, sequential panels.

[Enjay]

No! its 2 different frames. The first one is like Doom3 - you can't see anything. Then the guy starts pissing luminous green stuff and that lights up the scene.

[edit]The was to Demolisher - Gez just got in first [/edit]

[NeuralStunner]

The first one is like Doom3

And so is the second one LOLOLOLOL!!!11

[Caligari87]

I've created a minigun that actually mimics a real minigun. We're talking scarily-accurate-sixty-rounds-a-second-with-bullet-travel-and-tracers minigun. I made a roughly 2-mile square map with zterrain, loaded it with zombiemen, and strafe around in circles at 3000 units up at 8x zoom. Next step, thermal imaging graphics and destructible structures, an ac-130 guncam HUD, and artillery. Already got smoke and I'm half-way to destructible buildings.

[NeuralStunner]

Caligari: I pity the man that attempts to harm you or your family.

[Caligari87]

Lol, how so? I don't even own a gun (yet).

[NeuralStunner]

You do sound rather like a firearms enthusiast though, that alone can frighten the criminally inclined.