So, what are you working on right now?

[demagogue]

Cool kind of style.

If you figure out some good methods, would you mind possibly doing a wiki entry on megatextures explaining what mappers can do & roughly how to do it?

[Epifire]

Cool kind of style.

If you figure out some good methods, would you mind possibly doing a wiki entry on megatextures explaining what mappers can do & roughly how to do it?

 

Sure thing! I'd love to give a good and in depth article on the process. Depending on how well Substance Painter likes my massive (paint the whole friggin level in one shot) method, than I should have no problems for the last step. What's great is that if you have a good hand for modeling it's much more freeing to not have to worry about normal BSP mapping constraints. I can't tell you how much I've tweaked things and pulled stuff around to fit for this project. It's a pretty organic kind of structure with practically nothing being grid snapped (which is infuriating to work on at first).

 

Such as the the major brickwork. It's based off a large brick sheet I sculpted out into a 4k texture for generous resolution. Nice thing is it's big enough that I could stretch the thing out a lot to minimize excessive tiling, as it's used nearly everywhere. I'll be able to paint on top of it for dirt, moisture, and buildup details to break it up even more. What's even cooler is any UV edges I can mask even more with Substance Painter on the final detailing pass. Really excited!

[Bikerdude]

ooooh this is very "Fables of the Penitent Thief" but better -

 

[teh_saccade]

//

Edited July 17, 2016 by teh_saccade

[Melan]

Epifire: that looks mighty fine! It has been discussed that static mesh-based building methods would deliver the highest graphical fidelity, but you are the first to try it on a larger scale. Good luck!

 

When you are creating your textures, don't forget that you will have to break them down into pieces depending on material type. (Alternatively, do an extra editing pass with nodrawsolid textures.

[teh_saccade]

//

Edited July 17, 2016 by teh_saccade

[Spooks]

It looks really exciting! Do you have anything in mind with how you're going to do the visportaling and monsterclipping? Usually that's the biggest problem when it comes to levels made out of meshes rather than brushwork.

[demagogue]

You typically do visportaling by having skeleton brushes in the usual way and then just having the mesh fit on top of it.

[Spooks]

Yeah, I'm afraid with those curved walls there's going to be a lot of manual clipping/vert moving.

[Moonbo]

A big way to simplify this is to make your walls thick enough that you can run caulk brushes through their interior such that they don't poke out even if the walls curve. You'll need to chop up your meshes strategically too.

[Epifire]

The optimization is my biggest concern. Even if this was made of actual brushwork the big problem is that it's all open. You hardly have any visual cutoff from any angle (stairs or the central elevator shaft). With even two lights running shadows I notice a bit of a hit on my frames. Shadow meshes and disabling different portions that don't really need to be taken into account will help I think (certainly did with my other models I made).

 

There is space between the floors as they were built to snap together in XSI (our other name for Softimage) so there is room for BSP to be added in between. My current plans are to demo this space for a very specific scenario so I don't plan on having any NPCs running around as of yet, but monsterclip wouldn't be too hard to add. If you make stuff around one floor it can be duplicated up to another with ease, since each floor was actually modified from a single floor to start with.

 

You sure have your work cut out to paint the texture details and cut off the sharp divides but - you built the whole thing in softimage or something as one mesh?

How are you planning on texturing the single, massive model in DR? By face?
I've seen it's possible to export DR constructs as obj files to use elsewhere, or save as pre-fabs, but idk you could import them so easily (i tried copy-paste from zbrush and to import pre-fab, but it didn't find the files).

 

Here's my workflow. Build the basic blockout (using precise unit measurements) and see how I like the scale of the mesh in-game. Then I start making my tiling textures. Both the stone floor and brick were setup in Softimage to tile correctly, sculpted in Mudbox and then baked back down to a 4k texture in Soft.

All the areas I require to tile are ones that will be taken into account for the massive texture painting pass. Once the sections are complete I will split different levels into groups that are good enough to fill 8k worth of UV space without compromise.

 

Here's the interesting part. Once all the areas are set to be painted, all the floors will be loaded into Substance Painter. SP allows for multiple meshes to be painted at once with their own individual maps. Norm, Diff, and Spec all included with it's export. There I can blend stuff, add dirt, colors and more detailed destruction! Now you may be wondering, how am I going to tile the maps? They will actually be loaded into SP and then tiled (not before) since we can't have the classic overlapping UVs as we ordinarily would. Now hopefully between four 8k texture sheets there shouldn't be any noticeable detail loss. Only time will tell.

 

 

Epifire: that looks mighty fine! It has been discussed that static mesh-based building methods would deliver the highest graphical fidelity, but you are the first to try it on a larger scale. Good luck!

 

When you are creating your textures, don't forget that you will have to break them down into pieces depending on material type. (Alternatively, do an extra editing pass with nodrawsolid textures.

 

Do indulge me with this information (maybe in PM if it's fairly lengthy). Currently you're looking at two meshes in that whole map since I'm just testing the layout, but I was betting that would change down the road.

 

Alsssso there's a whole lab section I'm building that you all haven't seen yet. But I planned on having that around a corner so I could run it in it's own VisLeaf for sure. That should be at the bottom of the shaft but more on that later!

Edited March 15, 2016 by Epifire

[Melan]

Nothing involved, just the fact that surfaces in TDM should all have a material (stone, wood, etc.) associated with them for footstep sounds, rope attachment, and so on. Don't ask me for the technical details, though.

[teh_saccade]

//

Edited July 17, 2016 by teh_saccade

[Melan]

I promised there'd be no more preview images of Penny Dreadful 3... but I also expected to release it in early 2016. Due to getting hit with the Work Stick, that obviously didn't happen, and it is only in the last days that I could return to mapping. So, here is another screenie (oddly, they never do justice to what you can see in the game):

 

 

Now at 13297 brushes, 5381 patches and 4623 entities, and only a few more areas need to be built. Will still need optimalisation (I've got scenes with 6000+ drawcalls) and a whole lot of pre-release work.

[Bikerdude]

 

• Now at 13297 brushes, 5381 patches and 4623 entities, and only a few more areas need to be built.

 

Will still need optimalisation (I've got scenes with 6000+ drawcalls) and a whole lot of pre-release work.

 

 

• Very impressive work there young man

 

Got my work cut out for me then I see

 

[Melan]

It is one specific area, fortunately, and I'll try a few tricks before bothering you. The area is not func_portalled yet, which can make a significant difference The rest of the mission uses a much more conservative building approach.

[Deadlove]

 

Interior look at it, I've always loved staring at the auto map in DOOM and HERETIC/HEXEN. This is my own little creation. Such strange emotions!

[Arcturus]

I tried couple of times to make maps in Blender and what I learned is that it's best to have brushes ready before you start modelling. When I found out that there's a .map exporter for Blender I tried to make brushes in Blender too. Since it's been almost 2 years since I last worked on it, I thought I would post it here:

 

 

 

 

[Dragofer]

 

The wind howls..

 

 

(Zombie's rocks are great for lots of things, including arctic landscapes)

Edited March 17, 2016 by Dragofer

[SeriousToni]

OMG it's the Borealis!

[Bikerdude]

it's the Borealis!

heh, good one.

 

@Dragofer - nice. I recognise those models, nice material swap.

[Epifire]

I could probably do this in a different thread but random people had been asking for my machines I've made in TDM so far. This should be all the available stuff, PM me if there's anything wrong with it.

 

Cheers!

 

http://www.mediafire.com/folder/h27iw21t822we

 

EDIT: I may have a separate thread later that showcases some of the stuff but this is my main file dump for now. New stuff will be updated into the same link!

Edited March 19, 2016 by Epifire

[Melan]

Epifire: splendid! I would be real happy to be able to use some of them in Penny Dreadful 3.

 

Could you perhaps upload an archive containing all the files in these folders? Otherwise, only a Mediafire Pro account will let people download them in bulk (as opposed to a file-by-file basis).

[Epifire]

Oh does it not let you download the whole folder? Hmm a zip should work right?

[Melan]

Yes, it would!