Blender 2.61 - export to .map

[Arcturus]

I changed the texture of metal parts:

 

Highpoly:

 

Lowpoly:

 

[Arcturus]

Now the door. Highpoly:

 

 

Lowpoly:

 

 

I need to make new handle. Visportal is made of for brushes:

 

 

It works fine, but apparently in order to close it, every plane needs to be crossed by a separate door entity:

 

 

[Baddcog]

lol, you and your crazy vp's.

 

Door looks nice but the lock plate seems a bit cramped.

 

And what's up with the two stones sticking out to the side like that?

[Springheel]

Beautiful! I'd shrink the lock plate just a bit though as BC said.

[Arcturus]

I will make a new lock.

[Arcturus]

I've simplified the brushwork. Now there is only one brush inside the doorway:

[Diego]

This is pretty impressive! Creating levels inside a modeling program probably saves a few ages of dark radiant work.

 

Edit: I might even feel motivated to try some mapping

Edited February 26, 2012 by Diego

[Arcturus]

I'm glad I inspired you It would be impossible to make a round, tapering tower with properly visportaled windows and floors in Darkradiant. If you use Blender it takes a lot of planning but at least it becomes possible. If you want to make your architecture out of static meshes (like I do) you will still need brushes to make portals and path finding. It's probably easier to do all the work in a single app.

For creating simple, square buildings out of brushes only, Radiant is easier, because you skip the process of exporting geometry from Blender.

[Arcturus]

I've been working on the tower again:

 

[ungoliant]

inconceivable!

[RPGista]

Thats amazing, I really like... pretty much all of it, the stone work (is that stone floor modelled?), the door portal and window models, the new stone-stucco texture is very pleasant, and the stairs look quite detailed and organic. Very nice...

[Arcturus]

Thanks! The floor and pillar were modeled using masonry add-on for Blender. There are two blended textures on the wall and I'm thinking about adding a third one. Flat color of plaster helps to hide uv map imperfections.

 

[RPGista]

That floor as a concept works wonderfully (maybe just a little bit less height difference between stone pieces would make it even more realistic)! I particularly like the texture work, the blending looks very good, hiding the seams as you say, and making it feel "dustier", I must learn how to do that. Great attention to detail, I wish you will donate that handle we can see in the trap wooden door (as well as the nail heads), I dont remember it from the mod's assets and it looks simple and convincing.

Edited November 20, 2012 by RPGista

[ungoliant]

does the door and window actually go anywhere?? or is it blocked. For that matter, can that area even be visportalled at all?

[Arcturus]

That floor as a concept works wonderfully (maybe just a little bit less height difference between stone pieces would make it even more realistic)! I particularly like the texture work, the blending looks very good, hiding the seams as you say, and making it feel "dustier", I must learn how to do that. Great attention to detail, I wish you will donate that handle we can see in the trap wooden door (as well as the nail heads),

Difference of height on the floor is intentionally exaggerated for the coolness factor as from a normal perspective it's barely noticeable. There are no seems on the wall at all. Inner wall for the tower was unwrapped at one go and then cut into smaller pieces. Because the wall is bent and twisted, the uv map is distorted. The trap door is one model. Handle is separate and shares texture with nails. Once I finish I will publish the map so people can use them. Models have lower LOD versions.

does the door and window actually go anywhere?? or is it blocked. For that matter, can that area even be visportalled at all?

I think you can find answer to your questions earlier in the thread. Tower is visportalled, each floor and also window and door openings have visportals. There is a problem with walls and stairs as they don't get culled (they are visible form the outside even when tower is closed. But that is not an issue thanks to LOD (I hide them when they're outside of the players view). Objects further from the walls, including NPCs are culled properly. Nothing stops a mapper from adding something outside the tower or under the hatch.

[Arcturus]

I added 3rd texture on the wall. This week I bought my first serious monitor, Eizo FlexScan S2433W, so here's a 1920 x 1200px screenshot this time. Performance has dropped 10 fps due to higher resolution.

 

[SeriousToni]

Never buy a high quality screen without buying a high gpu!

[Arcturus]

Performance inside the tower is still pretty good so far. With my Radeon HD 4800, with 1920 x 1200, AA 4x and bloom maxed and medium LOD, it's 35 fps average inside the tower (sometimes below 30, sometimes over 40). That can still change though as I will be adding more objects. As for the monitor, I bought it mainly for Blender. I had enough of switching between views, hiding and opening menus etc. I needed more working space and better colors. And a bigger screen to watch movies. I still have my old monitor so I can work in dual screen mode.

[Serpentine]

Very interesting

 

I'd love to get some procedural stuff like that masonry plugin into the engine some day. Looks really neat seeing it all accurate to the textures(tho some normalmaps look inverted or something... hmm) like you have there!

 

Also - Welcome to the 16:10 bros club.

[Arcturus]

You can use masonry addon to build models. Texturing is traditional - you have to uv map them. Second copy has to be subdivided to bake normalmap from it. So both floor and column have unique textures, both 2048 x 2048 px diffusemap and 1024 px normalmap. You could of course have tileable textures, but without unique normalmaps and that wouldn't look as interesting. You would have either sharp edges (like brushes) or soft edges with incorrect shading. Or you could use much more polygons which would kill the performance.

[nbohr1more]

An interesting counter-point to your work Arcturus:

 

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25941

 

You can "inline" models. Which means they become brushes on map load. That negates

the benefit of shorter load times and smaller map sizes but the trade-off is that you

can use them to seal the void and portal. Apparently there are many reservations about this

as only two inline models were used in Doom 3...

[Arcturus]

I will do some tests with "inline" once I finish the tower. It would be nice to skip exporting to .map format before importing to radiant. But you would still need two versions of the model: detailed for visuals and simplified for visportaling and pathfinding. I'm actually using 3: one for visportaling, one for pathfinding (this one's the most simple) and one for visuals.

[Bikerdude]

Did you ever finish this tower..?

[Arcturus]

I didn't finish decorating it. The tower is to irregular and Darkmod doesn't like that. It generally works but I remember some weird behaviour of the NPC, I think they sometimes could see me through walls. I can see now that building maps in Blender is definitely possible, but tapering, skewed towers, with windows and floors are difficult to pull off in Darkmod. Anyway here are the files. You can use it if you want.

[Bikerdude]

Ta, may have to add this to the grass map you made...