high poly kungfu countered by sapien freeze attack

[sleepy1212]

Wow, you improved really fast. Your terrain looks very good considering how little experience you have. I noticed you chamfered your edges alot. This is okay, but you can't just leave the new edges wherever max puts them or else you have you will have ugly poly distribution (aka, the curves will still look blocky, and just have slightly smoother edges).

i've been doing this for almost a year now i just haven't made anything i really feel is good to release...2 other WIPs i'll finish when i learn enough to achieve what i want to with them. i noticed max chamfers like shit sometimes...its a good point though

The textures are blending together because of a lack of proper lighting/UV's/shaders. Rip yourself some good shaders/textures from the campaign and use those (unless you want to make your own, but it's a pain in the ass).

The UV's are a different story. When you ramp up your curves/poly count, proper UV's become an increasing nightmare. You ***could*** just use a box UV map, but you will have seams everywhere. The alternative is dividing up your mesh and unwrapping parts of the geometry individually, but this takes an ungodly amount of time, and I don't think you should really bother for your first map. Just make sure that if you do choose the easy route that you don't tile the texture to hell like you did in this alpha.

i like making my own textures, sometimes i use campaign details and bumps i just didn't bother making any for placeholders. though i was concerned about the cliff texture because in the past when i've made them with a direction "feel" e.g., with lines like my first build of this, the UVing looked awful when i made turns into tunnels.

i think i may just make a simple but large highres texture and then make a better detail map that way i can cut down on the tiling and still have high lod. this will help because a box uv will a go long way like this..but yeah, i've spent days unwrapping terrain and i still end up with ugly seams.

i'm going to unwrap the "floor" tonight and paint it sometime this week, this one is a must, no boxes here.

Lightmaps are the easiest part. Once you have shadows everywhere things won't blend together, and your geometry detail should stand out more.

that's good to know. there are hardly any very tight cliffs to follow that have good UVs or that aren't just straight up and down walls to compare to.

thanks for keeping up with this as well


UPDATE:

unwrapped the floor and went ahead and painted it




the unwrap isn't the best but about as good as i get atm.

[sleepy1212]

i think i may have unleashed a holy unwrapping nightmare on myself with this one. after spending several days trying different approaches i'm nowhere nearer to having this uv'ed than i was when i started. having so many twists and turns and cliffs sharing the same texture is not good although i'm very pleased with the texture itself so far.

i even cheated and tried unwrella2 out but with limited success...it made the cliff walls look great and gave me something i could work with and stitch together nicely but it quickly turned to shit in the lower, more convoluted areas of the terrain. it doesn't help that i'm missing a step using the seam helper; i can't find the tool to place the pelt seams manually to convert them to map seams.

i think i'm going to have to break the whole thing down, flatten..and stitch it together by hand. the good news, it's only the cliff texture i'm fighting with...all the other textures i'm able to do with ease.

[Kalub]

You might be better off just box mapping the cliffs with a tileable texture. Then using the shader add detail maps and shit. Keep with the ground being unwrapped though, just try that method for the cliffs.

[sleepy1212]

You might be better off just box mapping the cliffs with a tileable texture. Then using the shader add detail maps and shit. Keep with the ground being unwrapped though, just try that method for the cliffs.

i made the texture tileable already, just in case. the problem with box mapping is the horrible streching i get and bad seam placement. i started breaking things down into smaller chunks and box mapping those, the large boulder like parts i mean. this still gives bad scaling and some bad seams i'll have to hide.

i'm mostly just frustrated lol...it will just take a long time.

[Con]

The way I do cliffs is to UV one segment at a time using view-aligned planar, collapse the stack, then unwrap that section plus the previous section you UV'd right beside it. In the UV window, move the new section to the edge of the old one and stitch them together using the tools. You can fold the UVs back on themselves, move sections by whole texture lengths, or slightly stretch cliff segments to get things lining up and ready to stitch. Using this method, you can get seamless cliffs except for difficult areas around tunnels and caves. This is a more time consuming way of doing it, but you won't get the same results with some box mapping.

[sleepy1212]

sounds promising, especially for the vertical sections; although unwrella did i good job there i don't want to rely on a program too much. it's the tunnels, caves, land bridges, etc... that are causing the aneurysms. lots of "sudden changes of direction". i'm getting some good tips so hopefully i can make some progress on this over the next couple of days.

[Matooba]

Jeez, When I seen " high poly kungfu countered by sapien freeze attack" I expected to see this:


Nice Looking Map

P.S. Why is Bold stuck on?

[sleepy1212]

hey guess what....i'm still working on this fucking thing!!!! bah, mostly still trying to get the UV's looking good but since i was waiting on computer parts i decided to take a break from that and get some scenery work in.

if they turn out well i will release them as a desert scenery pack but i could use some crit.

and some help.....

1st, all the render only parts are lighted all wrong. only the tree trunk has normal collision and it renders fine. i need to know how to fix the others.

2nd, how to you UV rocks without seams?

here's some vid and the map this was shot in if anyone would like to take a closer look:



Desert Scenery Display .map

scenery featured:

agave
cactus
highgrass
lowgrass
sagebrush
desert cedar
large rock
med rock
small rock


i also need to know how to get some light down into the bsp of this map. it's not dark but very dull and it needs light without using actual lamps or skylight.

[Higuy]

i also need to know how to get some light down into the bsp of this map. it's not dark but very dull and it needs light without using actual lamps or skylight.

modfiy the b40 sky to your liking at use that

[kid908]

way too high in contrast in every field.
1. bright, dark
2. dull, interesting
3. detailed, low detail

It looks alot better than your first one, but the UV are horrid. work on uv, and such. Maybe less smooth cliffs.