Black Winter Environment

Avanthera

This is a small project between me and a few classmates. It will probably end up as a mod for unreal 3 or half life 2. Its a 3rd person shooter called Black Winter (subject to change). here is the first level, all textured and modeled by me using xsi mod tool and rendered by kerkythera, yeah, im poor.:)
Right now its sitting pretty at 1300 tri's with ten textures at 1.21 mb. I'm planning on expanding those counts a bit, maybe some pipes, vents, grates, trash and maybe throw in some wires sticking out of the wall for good measure.

here are two renders without walls





and two inside with walls

Crits and comments welcome!

Lee3dee

a couple of thoughts........the stairs, did you use a reference character to make sure they can go use then in Unreal or HL? Cause from 1 angle they look like they are spaced to far apart. The texturing is a good start, but you could use some grime on the bricks, they look too recent in what looks like an older building.

I'm more familiar with unreal than HL2 editor, but you could probably remake this model using BSP/Brush and you could spend more time on making decoration meshes to add to the scene. Its just a thought though.

Avanthera

right, right, i was wanting to make the walls, floor, and roof out of brushes and import the stairs and the smaller walls.

I made the stairs just to see how this would fit in, I will probably change that. one wall (the one with bricks stacked in the middle of it) is supposed to be animated ie:fall over. what all should i stick to brushes and what should I use static meshes for?

00Zero

cool start. yea, considering that most of this is flat geometry, you should probably make this part out of bsp.

also, the stairs, they cant be steeper than a certain amount (i forgot exactly what) or else the player wont be able to go up them, theyll just slide back down. and your stairs right now are way steep.

good luck

Lord Ned

Probably going to want to just build your level in their appropriate editors, instead of a modeling app.

Avanthera

thanks for the advice. I probably will end up redoing this level in an editor, as far as a scene for animation(for a teaser) what do you think? Ive got some work done on it, not much but I am still working on what to do with this scene.

I Added This Grate:


and I made this soldier:








And He has to have a weapon...

Well, its not much of a weapon, but its a lot better than bringing a knife to a gunfight.
An assault rifle is still in concept stage...can't decide what style I want.

The soldier is called an elite, I don't have the concept art for it, it has been modified a lot since that stage. I am still looking for what to add to it to make it more... interesting? dunno, needs an ammo belt and grenades, or something. He is supposed to be a cop/soldier. so he doesn't need 3 days worth of supplies or grenades, cause all hes fighting are rebellious citizens.

Avanthera

Also- here is an older pic of the soldier, with a trench coat. I changed it and just cant decide which is better.:susp:

by the way, the xsi demo water marks are from xsi mod tool. the mod tool doesn't have a renderer and I didnt want to set this all up in kerkythera, sorry.

Avanthera

well, I looked it up, and the max climb angle for valve is 45 degrees, unreal is... dunno, can't find it.:\
The maximum height, in game units, an object can be while still allowing the player to walk over it is about 18 units high in hammer and 32 in unreal. half of these (9 and 16) are usually used in stairs.
18 hammer units and 32 Unreal units end up at the bottom of the knee on most characters.

(I figured I would just post this since I took so long to dig this up.)

the reference I used had my stairs at about upper/mid shin and the angle of my stairs are exactly 45 degrees. dunno how badly this will make my camera shake from such big stairs, and the angle is a bit too close for comfort, I'll probably change the scene and use brushes for the rest of the blocky stuff.

I am still thinking about the 'floating' stairs, is that possible with bsp brushes and still look good?

Lord Ned

Hahah should have asked me. I know the in's and outs of source like the back of my hand. (Speaking of which, when did that scratch get there)