Acutally it's a non-detailed non vomit-inducing inset. Though I actually like Silicon's better. The angles in Bungie's inset dont match the surroundings.
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Acutally it's a non-detailed non vomit-inducing inset. Though I actually like Silicon's better. The angles in Bungie's inset dont match the surroundings.
It looks fine, you guys just like to nitpick over pointless little shit.
OH GOD THOSE FOURTEEN POLYGONS PISS ME OFF
This post was made on medication.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Llama Juice
The inset is actually 26 tri's.
http://palmgoon.com/wp-content/uploa..._you_know2.jpg
And mine are 22 and 28, respectively. :downs: Also, +rep for Reading Rainbow.
HEY FUCK YOU THIS IS MODACITY IF WE DON'T COMPLAIN ABOUT EVERY FUCKING THING THAT PISSES US OFF IN MAPS WE MIGHT RELEASE THINGS.Quote:
Originally Posted by Llama Juice
FUCUKFCUKFCUKK!!!
All right, after much messing around with alcoves and indents from TSC, I decided the originals were good enough, but I fixed the angles on the one by the ladderwell, and retextured both so they look a little more interesting. The whole border is now all pretty looking if you get up close to it.
Before I compiled the level again, I also added some lights near the tunnel entrances- before, they were almost impossible to see before your warthog fell into them. Please excuse my portal geometry.
In terms of performance (as in FPS etc) and navigation, how well is it to play the level? I'm asking this because I have been in a ton of maps that I play often, but it takes me playthroughs to figure out where everything is when the locations should be obvious. What I mean is, will we know where to go and will we find what we seek by just playing the level (as opposed to having to explore it in LAN first)?
I can run it fairly fine, but it would be hard to give an accurate estimate because I usually run it with a lot of other tools going during development. Next time I restart my computer and free all my ram I'll let you know. If any beta testers want to add their own experiences in here, that would work too.
As for figuring out where everything is, the lighting tells you pretty blatantly what side you're on, and I've done my best to label the teleporters so you know what each one does/where it goes. It might be beneficial to have a run around the map before playing, since it is pretty large. However, at this point player movement has been made far more linear than before, so you shouldn't get too lost.
Edit:
Progress continues!
I have a 3-way comparison for you tonight.
Compare this render:
To this old WIP ingame screencap:
To this current sapien screencap:
Definitely getting there, but I'm going to attempt to get the colors looking a little more vibrant, like the original render. It's a pain though, because the render pulled it off by slightly overexposing the colors into the white. However, try that in Halo and it just goes all splotchy. So I'm playing with the colors themselves to make them brighter without actually modifying the intensity of the lights.
And just for good measure, here are the modified insets in sapien:
A little dark, due to (more detailed?) lightmap uvs. Before, the light bled a lot more. I probably need to brighten up that area, just a little, so players can see better.
Those insets no longer make me gag.
Lookin' awesome!
I agree, the lighting really fixed it up.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dwood
I dont like the texture on the 1st inset. Doesnt quite match...
LEAVE THE INSETS ALONE
http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/3...ockercries.jpg
*shiversQuote:
Originally Posted by Con
Hahahaha must spread rep before I can rep you for that, Con. I'm a perfectionist, but there's only so far I'll go. The indents have been discussed to death- they're staying the way they are. You won't notice them that much. Really.
Fine! Keep the inset textures. :mech:
Yeah, yeah- as a consolation prize I have 3 sapien screenshots that show the sort of fine tuning I'm working on at the moment:
Two days ago:
Later that same day:
Yesterday:
Progress continues!
I dig the colours.
What happened to the purple things in the 1st pic?
Oh- that's part of the ceiling- the camera just happened to be slightly lower in the second two pics.
Wait that's part of the cieling? But the purple things go down the walls... unless depth perception is screwing me up...
But yea, the lighting is much better. Keep at it!
I point you to these old test renders:
It's a chandelier-type structure coming out of the middle of the ceiling extending a little ways down into the room. Generally unrelated to the blinky light (aka panel_generator) strips on the walls.
Dammit those old renders looked nice. I'll keep doing my best to make the ingame stuff look as close as possible.
That looks really cool.
All right, daily update time. Heh, this is starting to get like it was last summer.
I've been working on the base entrances, as well as checking to make sure the canyon lighting is still set correctly. As such, I've finished both. Note that in the two base entrance shots, I accidentally turned off the skylight, so in the final there will be a very small amount of extra ambient light. The shot of the canyon lighting, however, has the skylight turned on, as I did that beforehand.
Also take note that since the skylight is turned off, there should be NO LIGHT AT ALL in the canyon in those two shots. In fact, there isn't. It's totally pitch black. But Halo's amazingly retarded fog system manages to boost the gamma of anything in its influence. - _ - Wreaks total havoc with my lighting and shading.
So lower the fuck out of the fog level?
At the least it'd be interesting to see :)
Yeah, I was thinking about turning off the atmospheric fog for the time being so I could work on lightmaps without trying to guess what's shadow and what's not. Unfortunately, without the fog the map ends up looking rather plain- it's unrealistic for there to be no fog at all in the air, but I'll experiment with that later.
Update:
What's that? Urk released the Bungie weekly update a day early, and it's full of awesome?
Well, I can't let that go without challenge:
Fog is totally off for the time being, and a lot of lights are off, mainly the banshee pads and the tunnel entrances.
Lookin sharp sir, is there a way to just lower the intensity of the fog? Wouldn't that solve your problem for ye?
Yes, there is, and I'll probably do that. But this way I can calibrate the lights to the actual level, instead of the fog-related view. Before, they looked all washed out, and now they're awesomely-saturated. I'll keep the fog off from here on out until the very end.
Edit: Lightning pointed out that the purple blinky generator lights down by the energy port are a little pinkish. Turns out that entire section of lights was still using inverse decay, and was therefore messing with the color closest to the light. Fixed, and rendering out a new version to test it.
Edit:
BUT WAIT:
THERE'S MORE!
Wow!!:woop:
Also, funny how you mentioned Urk's early update, I saw as it just before I read your comment.
EDIT: I just realised. The main bridge has more red lights than blue(underneath). Maybe that last lot of red lights before the gap should be purple/white/none? Just sayin'. =)
Update time again:
I turned on all exterior lights and calibrated them. Teleporters now give off green light, the tunnel entrances (here seen in the lower left corner) have new lights, and the neon pink light issue near the energy port has been fixed. The banshee pads are turned on, but for some bizarre reason they had weird settings- I'm working to recalibrate them, and that shouldn't take long.
The energy port lights are also a little dimmer than before- I decided the old version was less realistic- some blinky lights wouldn't light up 20 feet on either side. Also, the purple glow in the first image was from the beam- in this new one the dynamic light simply wasn't illuminating the wall at the instant I took the picture.
My god that's beautiful. I shuddered when I saw Con's impressive skybox for Lumoria, but this tops it for me. You actually have built the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in the Halo engine. Scenery, geometry, lighting. You got it all.
Here, have a wallpaper, because I love you all and I'm tired and I feel like doing cool stuff.
Looks great. Your lighting quality is amazing.
Can you post the wallpaper without the words?
Sure.
There you go.
A pity I don't have a screen higher res than that, so I can't take larger screenshots. But hopefully that'll do.
Glad everyone likes the lighting- I'm really happy with it myself. Next step is to make sure the banshee pads look good again, then start copying the settings from blue base to red base. Will take a while, but this time I won't have to do a hundred test renders along the way, so should go faster.
Beautiful work going on here :). I had a look at fixing the bitmap in use problem for you, new executable here. It's not tested so i'd keep a hold of the original. Let me know if it's still not fixed.
Awesome! Works like a charm. You are the man.
For reference, the issue in question was that once a scenario file was open in Aether, sapien couldn't open it because Aether was using the .bitmap tag. As a result, every time I wanted to test a render I'd have to close and completely reopen Aether, which includes finding the scenario path, finding the bitmap render path, etc. etc. Now that this is fixed, I can open it once, and just keep updating the files without having to ever close Aether. It'll save a lot of time. Thanks dude!
Well shit, this came together really well.
Yeah it did. I mean, the modeling of the level could be a touch better. Not saying the layout is bad or anything, but just have someone go in there and touch it all up. But that mixed with this amazing lighting, would make a kick ass map. But even so, I think it's going to make a great map anyway.
Truly Amazing. You're doing wonders on touching this up with beauty. :) I look forward to this release.
Haha me too.
I transferred all the settings from blue base to red base today, but based on the 5-hour rest render, it still needs some touch ups. A few places are overexposed, and others are too dark. Still, a nice step forward.
Wow, I haven't taken the time to revisit the H:CE community in a long time. I'm thrilled that there is still some incredible work being done here. The map is beautiful. I deeply look forward to playing this map for myself.
I called it. :P hahahaQuote:
Originally Posted by Siliconmaster
Hey, I now have red base essentially done except for the uvs, and I'm fixing up the credits room lighting. Unfortunately I'm gone this weekend, so doing last minute lighting tweaks will have to wait until Monday afternoon.
Edit: But before I go, I just finished the credits room, or at least as much as I could before the low-res lightmap in this area prevented me from making it any more precise. It became "is this wall lit, or is it dark" after a while. Blegh. Wish there were more room in the lightmap bitmap tag.
Note that I'm not going to tell people who don't already know where it is, only show off the basic look. Also, there are, or will be, if I can get it working right with Inferno's help, some fun little things in this area.
Sweet!!!:iamafag:
I was almost heading out the door when I was hit by a bit of inspiration, resulting in this:
Creepy green flood light anyone? Ignore the rest of the base- I didn't render all the lightmaps, just the flood tunnels.
Ok. That. Looks. Epic.
Bit too green though? Maybe make it SLIGHTLY more yellow? But not as yellow as the light at the top of the pic..
Yeah, that does look epic!
what looks epic? THERES FUCKING NOTHING TO SEE except for a few dots.
That would look so much cooler if it was all TRON-lighting.
This.Quote:
Originally Posted by neuro
...The focus was the new green lighting inside the flood tunnel. I made it clear the the rest of the base lighting was off due to rendering. But I had the camera a ways out to get a little bit of perspective. Jeez. Nothing too impressive, just cool.
And Tron. Lul.
But the word epic is far too overused in this thread. Needs to stop. Isn't always an accurate description.
The word "epic" has many different tiers...
I think we're overusing the word here because the map in general is epic.:downs:
No, epic is a teir of it's own and anybody who thinks otherwise is 14 <:maddowns:>
/derail
Tron up your map bro.
It's funny how TRON already looks forerunner-ish.
http://www.majhost.com/gallery/Talon...omstuff/53.jpg
Or 17... I don't know, too much sugar earlier, made that up on the spot.Quote:
Originally Posted by n00b1n8R
Back on topic...:golfclap:
Holy Jesus's shit and a half Batman, this doesn't look like the test map I played a lifetime ago...
Looks extremely good.
It would be interesting to have a TRONesque map in Halo CE! I suppose that someone could take an existing map and TRONify it!Quote:
Originally Posted by Cagerrin
:tinfoil:
BTW, this map is looking better with each report, Silicon!
:woop:
Alright, I'm back from vacation, and while I was gone I had my computer render all 21 lightmaps with all 5717 lights turned on. Took 2 and a half days, according to the latest modified lightmap. It's really nice to be able to see the entire map lit at once, so I can really see the transitions between areas and whether there need to be changes.
Looking good man
I saw it and if i wouldn't have been awe-struck my jaw would have dropped.
I'm headed back to college, so I won't be able to work on this project for a few days. However, I hereby proclaim the bsp to be finalized, unless for some reason people find something game-breaking and drastic that absolutely requires fixing. Con and I tested how easy it was to get out of the map, and I added player clipping to compensate. And even though my continuing issues with usertool prevent me from importing new lightmap uvs into Halo, I've been methodically fixing them in max. I've now finished fixing 8 out of the 21 lightmaps, and once I have time again it won't be all that long until I finish them all. However, if for some reason I have to recompile the bsp, all that work will be wasted, hence the bsp finalization. After that it's weapon placements, minor fixes, and bug tests.
See you in a few.
Congratulations on a new year of school! I get more and more excited for this map each and every day!Quote:
Originally Posted by Siliconmaster
Woohoo!
\o/
Looks more epic every time I see it!
Would love to betatest this with you guys...
Thanks to Skarma, usertool now works on my computer. The first import tests have been very successful, but I've been seeing a few very odd glitches. I think the importer may be modifying the level uvs as well, resulting in bizarre uv errors that were NOT there before. I managed to recover it from the ingame build, but just barely.
Edit: Confirmed. Prior to the import, the uv error was not there.
Edit 9-2-10: The uv issue is totally messed up. I'm putting it on hold until I can talk to Firescythe about it. However, I did manage to remove the branches from the pine tree collision model. Now vehicles won't bounce off the smallest branch, but will brush through them. Much more enjoyable for all involved.
All right, I don't care about double posting, because this is a big deal. The issues I was having with the lightmap import process seem to have fixed themselves after 5 days of experimenting, and I'm going forward as fast as possible trying to fix all the remaining lightmap uv errors. Here are some screenshots of the fixed areas. Nothing is final, and I'm always seeing little glitches here or there that I need to fix. Hopefully these will be good though.
Half the time it's not just fixing errors, it's raising the resolution and making important areas higher-res than areas of lower importance. Take a look at the shadows and shading for examples of this.
Look, shadows! And shading!
:iamafag:
That's amazing. I've never seen halo lit that well ._.
*salivating
This map is beyond fantastic! You might give this a show to Bungie. Who knows? You may have a job opening once you finish school!
:eng101:
I doubt it, because this engine is nothing like what they're using now.Quote:
Originally Posted by POQPrince
Map is looking good though dude, keep it up. You have something good going here.
That's not what matters, though. Not every employee at Bungie had access to the sort of equipment they have now, before being inducted.Quote:
Originally Posted by ThePlague
Honestly I'm doing this for fun- my film work is my job direction. Glad people like the screencaps though. I hope to get the other 50% of the uvs fixed within a week or so, hopefully sooner. We'll see depending on my school work and other plans.
If only you did the lighting in Reach...
I think Bungie can handle its own lighting :P Do remember this is current-day lighting style in an old engine. The lighting I've seen in Reach via trailers and stuff looks pretty darn nice.
Reach trailers vs. Reach ingame.. ehh.
Still, if you can put out this kinda work on an engine as old as halo's, I'd like to see some of your work on newer games..
Remember, just because you become proficient at one engine, doesn't mean you will instantly be a genius in another engine. It takes a lot of time to become good at something and a hell of a lot of practice, so really, if the average person spent enough time and dedication that Silicon does, they would have similar looking pieces.Quote:
Originally Posted by EX12693
Meh. Opinion is opinion. I still say Silicon is better at this than many others I've seen, engine aside.
In addition, considering what they've had to left out, the Halo Reach engine seems very different than our beloved HCE engine. For example, ambient life, which is very easy in HCE, is not possible if animations aren't right in Halo Reach because it messes with other systems, which animations do not do in HCE. Or at least, that's what I've heard.Quote:
Originally Posted by Amit
I agree with Amit- all someone has to do is keep at it and you'll eventually get good at something. This map might be taking forever, but if it weren't, it wouldn't look as good as it does.
Also, dammit Halo, why do your uvs suck?
That square of tiny little pieces is Halo's uvs, and the shapes around it are my WIP fixed uvs. And I need to fit them all in a single uv map. Blarg.
Looks awesome man
Took me 4 hours, but I finished lightmap 16. And this morning, after finally getting the 7 on the 7th achievement, and therefore Recon (for the hell of it), I also fixed lightmap 17. Looks like 19 is another horrible one, but 18, 20, and 21 appear fairly easy to fix.
Pssh, I got Recon sooo long ago :pQuote:
Originally Posted by Siliconmaster
Nice work on the lightmaps though. Can't wait to see them.
You got Recon one week before Reach is released.Quote:
Originally Posted by Siliconmaster
Correction: I finished off Halo 3's important achievements one week before Reach is released. Therefore, satisfaction.Quote:
Originally Posted by TEMPTii
Also, Lightmap 18 is done.
$5 says there's a special hat for people with recon in reachQuote:
Originally Posted by TEMPTii
I bet the font on the hat will be comic sans.Quote:
Originally Posted by n00b1n8R
GLARGALARBLE
4 Hours. Of moving around faces. I now have carpel tunnel from these damned lightmaps.
Also, they're now done. All of them. Pics once they're rendered in about..... 30 hours.
I'm curious how this map plays. I couldn't help but notice it looks LOLhuge.
It plays decently, more so after the (semi)recent layout changes. Once the weapon layouts have been redone it should play even better.
Also, you just noticed it's a huge map? :P
No, I just didn't want to hurt your feelings. :(
Haha no worries- between Llama's modeling critiques and Con's layout comments, someone pointing out the size of the map isn't insulting at all. I probably redid 60% of the map due to those two. :P
:D
Also, the map looks awesome now, so quityerbitchin.
Good news: the lightmaps are all rendered, and they look gorgeous.
Bad news: somewhere along the way the map picked up 3 phantom bsp errors.
So now I get to embark along a little project i like to call "yell and panic and then start fixing the errors and hope to god when I import the bsp the lightmap geometry doesn't change too much."
Tuesday now seems so very close, and there is so much to do.
Do the phantom BSPs affect gameplay too much? That honestly sucks. Is there any reason why Phantom BSPs pop-up in the first place?
no one knows.Quote:
Originally Posted by DarkHalo003
Unfortunately they're right where a lot of banshee traffic would be. My hope is that because the bsp has only changed ever so slightly, the lightmaps will still be (almost) the same, meaning I'll be able to transfer the uvs over. If not, idk. We'll see.
Really, I'm annoyed at myself, because I should have run a check for phantom bsp before I started on the lightmap work. Unfortunately, at the time I assumed that because I hadn't changed much, there wouldn't be any new occurrences. Apparently I was wrong.
Edit 9-20-10:
Alright, Reach has totally eaten my life, and I now have a girlfriend, so things have been a bit hectic where Precipice work is concerned. However, the damage from the phantom bsp errors is now apparent.
After chasing bsp errors around the map for at least 8 compiles (I'm convinced it was just trolling me) I managed to get it to move where very few people will ever encounter it. And I now have 5 out of 22 lightmap uvs redone. Yes, I actually have to redo every single lightmap. A total pain, but w/e- if I do one a day, I'll be done within a few weeks- if more than one, a lot sooner. Theoretically Inferno is still going to do some work on the tags, and then when all is fixed up we'll go from there.
MY GIRLFRIENDQuote:
Originally Posted by Siliconmaster
K, new update- I've managed to get lightmaps 1-13 fixed and rendered. It's going at a decent pace, but I'm quite busy. Screenshots are useless at the moment seeing as half the map is a dull gray, and the other half looks like a christmas tree on shrooms. Eventually all the lightmaps will be rendered and imported, and then there shall be a new batch of screenshots. And hopefully soon after that, a map release.
FANTASTIC NEWS! Keep it up, Silicon!
