Unearthly Challenge | MoP | Jungle Ruin
polycounter lvl 18
Well, I've been meaning to do an environment exactly like this for the past year or so and never got round to it. I have a bunch of cool ref photos lying around from various plans...
Concept I chose (from Big Huge Games): http://www.gameartisans.org/contests/events/4/concepts/images/5.jpg
Here's one of the pictures from my ref collection (I have 280mb of Cambodia / Angkor Wat photos alone!), I see this as a primary source of texture and structural reference.
I think I can make this scene very modular, in fact I'm prototyping it in a level editor first, with quick sketch textures to get the basic metrics of the whole project, then later go in and detail stuff out as necessary. I am treating it as a full level and hope to have a small playable deathmatch environment when I'm done.
Concept I chose (from Big Huge Games): http://www.gameartisans.org/contests/events/4/concepts/images/5.jpg
Here's one of the pictures from my ref collection (I have 280mb of Cambodia / Angkor Wat photos alone!), I see this as a primary source of texture and structural reference.
I think I can make this scene very modular, in fact I'm prototyping it in a level editor first, with quick sketch textures to get the basic metrics of the whole project, then later go in and detail stuff out as necessary. I am treating it as a full level and hope to have a small playable deathmatch environment when I'm done.
Replies
I'm texturesheeting everything to keep the batch count down, and currently working at 4:1 pixel to game unit ratio (player height is about 80 units, so a standard room's interior wall height should be 128 units, which is a 512px high texture).
That means if I make eight 512x2048 tiling texture sheets, each sheet can contain about 3 wall pieces (or two double-height pieces) plus a bunch of re-usable trims.
And then I have 2048x4096 left for unique structural stuff, vegetation, props, and any textures which need to tile in all directions (floors, ceilings, generic surface covering).
Should work out pretty well!
mop and me have "megatexture".. we eat two 4ks for breakfast
But yeah, after have a 32768 x 32768 texture to play with for terrain, this seems quite low res! Then again, after having 256x2048 texturesheets for a lot of ETQW maps, it also seems quite a generous budget
Click here for full-size image...
The texture is just a photo-hack to get the layout nice and re-usable. It's all on a 64-pixel (16-unit) grid, all the geometry is currently simple brushes and patches in ETQW's EditWorld.
I will move them over to models later and ZBrush the textures to get a lot of nice natural detail and carvings into them. For now I don't want to waste time on detail, instead it's more metrics and planning stages. I'm building a level out of these pieces as I go.
Next step is to build some more modular parts for palisades, roof parts and fencing. Then I will build some blockout geometry for the "focal parts", probably going for some of the statues and heavy bridge work shown in the concept.
want to see a proper concept! the base one is kinda vague (but cool)
I expect most of the stuff I'm doing now will serve as a foundation and background static meshes for the main focal point (or two). Will probably rough out some geometry in EditWorld to try and find some good camera angles for masses and volumes in the environment, then paint over that.
-caseyjones
http://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g297390-d325222-Reviews-Ta_Prohm-Siem_Reap.html
EDIT: Removed annoying youtube link...
OK, I decided to take a step back and actually try and figure out a backstory and concept for this whole place.
In the concept art I chose, there definitely appears to be a statue of some sort of snake-man, so I'm going to go with this...
The Snake Goddess's Temple
There was a jungle-dwelling civilization about 2500 years ago who worshipped Selucha, a cruel night goddess who was said to be half-woman, half snake.
The high priests constructed an elaborate temple with many likenesses of Selucha and her serpent servants, including a pit containing several large statues, where they would ritually sacrifice humans against their will.
Thousands of years later, the civilisation is long dead, but the evil had been fed well by all the sacrifices, and now the goddess has chosen to re-awaken the ancient magic in the temple...
</cheesy>
But it should be fun. And I can have cool particle and lighting effects.