OrbWeaver
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Posts posted by OrbWeaver
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Some model shots as requested:
http://img281.echo.cx/img281/8379/odrailing7hf.jpg
http://img110.echo.cx/img110/1320/musrope6ha.jpg
(The rope comes out slightly better in game, the screenshot is only 1024x768 with no AA so the "twisted rope" effect is reduced slightly).
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Yet Discrete/Id did release the Tempest Gamepack for Quake 3 (not that it was overly good though, and I am not sure if Id actually paid anything for it)... about the only other games that support Gmax are a few Microsoft games - guess they have the cash to splash around on that sort of thing. I'll be giving Blender anoter try, methinks...
Can you bake normal maps in Blender?
Not yet, at least not within Blender itself. The best way to do this is by exporting models as ASE with the fast Doom 3 exporter (http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=10999) and using the freeware ORB RenderBump tool (http://www.pcgamemods.com/11163/).
You can also export to LWO and use Doom 3 to renderbump but this gives very inferior results in my experience.
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Does anyone think that Id will release a GMax gamepak for Doom 3? It would be a really good thing for modders, but may well not be worth the effort for them, given Kinetix's massive licensing fees...
It's not really something I can imagine Carmack wanting to do - pay large licensing fees to a 3rd party for the privilege of allowing modders to use their proprietary tools. He's very much an "open formats" kind of guy.
If you haven't tried Blender I suggest you give it a go - there is a steep learning curve (as with any full-featured 3D editor) but it supports both LWO and ASE very nicely and is open source, so you can't get much more low-budget than that.
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I was wondering if it is possible to postpone my application. The standards of this mod are exceptionally high and I think it would be necessary to spend some time developing my skills to the point where I can make a meaningful contribution, rather than wasting people's time with "average" work.
Good luck with your mod, and I hope I will be able to join you at a later date.
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If they would support Blender natively, this would alerady be a big step. After all it's free and it can do all the stuff that you need. Of course for big comapnies they do not care much about the license fees for Maya or Lightwave.
I'm not sure what you mean by "natively" - both D3 and Unreal support the ASE format which can be used perfectly from Blender. Of course T3 has to do things differently and use a custom-designed in-house format for meshes (presumably a design decision to optimise for - you guessed it - XBox).
To those comparing the relative merits of Unreal vs Doom 3's geometry paradigm, remember that you cannot use T3Ed as an example of Unreal's limitations. T3 uses a completely separate BSP tree which takes the Unreal BSP as its input (somebody presumably knows why, although I don't), and this "Flesh BSP" is what causes limitations on BSP complexity.
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It is horrifyingly effective at culling unnecessary polys - you don't need to caulk in D3 at all.
And in fact it's a lot faster IMO, especially than DromEd. In dromed, to make anything more complex than a box you have to have multiple brushes which all intersect and only work in the right order, and you then have to wait for it to compile before you can see it.
In D3 you just make the room out of solid bits, there's no hanging around waiting for compile, or even lighting as it's all instant. It's defintely the fastest editor I've worked with.
Agreed. I do not use Hollow at all, I find it confusing. Instead I just block out the floorplan of the map by drawing brushes that are one grid unit thick. Then I draw out a wall, bring it up to the correct height and clone/resize it all over the place to make the wall plan. Then I select all the floor brushes, clone them and drag upwards to make the ceiling.
The ability to quickly draw and resize solid brushes makes this very quick, even for fairly complex floorplans that would take a long time to create by resizing and rotating the Builder Brush in UnrealEd/T3Ed.
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Orb, I remember seeing you post that hardwood floor on D3W and it looked a helluva lot better than that. The one you're showing here looks like it's been blurred hardcore.
You are right, they do actually look pretty blurry in those screenshots. I am not sure if it is poor lighting, JPEG compression or the fact that I took them from the editor rather than the main game, so stuff like anisotropic filtering may not have been in effect.
I will go back and take them again from the main game at full resolution with high graphics options enabled, and see if they look any better.
EDIT: Racked up my graphics settings and tooks some more, which are a lot less blurred (I think it was image_anisotropy which was set to 1, should have been 8).
http://img235.echo.cx/img235/5589/shot000178ut.jpg
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Hi all, thanks for your replies and your feedback.
I agree that the textures could use more detail (I assume this is what you mean by "low-res" - they are all 512x512 or more). I will work on distressing them somewhat, and adding some more finer detail, dirt & noise etc..
I am currently working on:
- More ornamentation for the corridor scenes - some columns, ceiling trims etc.
- Adding detail to the wall lights, renderbumping and skinning them properly, they are relatively low-detail at the moment which is why they are only shown far away
- New models w/ skins - I want some kind of font/fountain for the alcove area in the mansion shot, some more efficient chains/ropes for indoor use (those chains are about 3k polys per segment), and some railings and bannisters for mansion scenes.
I will post updates to these as and when I get them done. I am not sure what sort of timescales this will involve; I don't want to do a rush job but neither do I want to "miss the boat", so to speak.
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I'd say the best thing to do there would be to bottleneck 2 complicated areas and put another portaled zone between em.
Like instead of having 2 gigantic rooms with loads of cool architecture side by side have a small hallway connecting them together instead.
OK, that's what I thought. By "65k per portal" you meant "65k renderable at any one time", and it's up the the designer to make sure the visportals are set up correctly to effect this.
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I hope you will find some time to answer some of my basic questions about the toolset you're going to release.
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Thanks in advance!
To some of your questions:
1 & 2) Importing textures into Doom 3 is creating some TGA images and putting them in a folder, with a text file to describe all their parameters. Much easier than T3Ed and you do not need any external software (other than to create the TGAs). Models are similarly easy, dump them in a folder using an open format (ASE or LWO), which you can export to from loads of free and commercial applications.
5) I never liked Dromed, but I did like T3Ed (in terms of the actual editor interface). Radiant is probably somwhere in between, it is not quite as nice as UnrealEd but it gets the job done. One thing you have to get used to with Doom 3 is the different workflow for creating levels - there are no subtractive brushes, everything is additive, which takes some adjustment if you come from an Unreal/Thief editing background.
8) Yes. Doom 3 can handle much more than Dromed. On my Radeon 9800 XT I can have a scene with upwards of 150k polys with dynamic shadows and it still runs at 1280x1024 at 25 fps.
I can't answer your other questions as I am not a Dark Mod developer, however in general the Doom 3 engine kicks serious ass compared to the Thief engines.
(BTW your English is indistinguishable from most native speakers).
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Doom 3 lighting is amazing. Behind that unobtrusive looking "texture" dropdown lies a wealth of programmable lighting flexibility.
It just gives the impression it is limited because most of the power is in the light shaders (text files), rather than in exposed properties in the light editor as with T3Ed.
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Average is usually about 65-75,000 tris per portal. You can go higher than that, but it's always good to keep the low end people in mind.
Does that take into account the fact that you may be rendering more than one visportal at once? If you have two adjacent portals with 75,000 tris each, you may be able to see 150,000 if you stand in the right position.
Orb Weaver's Application
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Fair point - I was originally intending to make it a lot rougher but I kind of liked the way it came out and stuck with it. It would be a five-minute job to change, though.