how to mimic DOOM 3 Style ?
hello guys , i need you advices and opinions about creating environement similar to Doom 3 , i want to mimic the architecture and the textures ...
and the most hard part is how to create a playable space , that makes sens... you know what i mean :shifty:
thank you !
and the most hard part is how to create a playable space , that makes sens... you know what i mean :shifty:
thank you !
Replies
Personally, I would imagine the space you want to create first, sketch it out on graph paper. Keep it grounded by thinking about what it is used for, what real world analogies there are, and find images of the kind of things that would populate your environment. Next pull pull loads of screenshots from Doom 3 that capture the atmosphere and style you want, and use this as a style guide. After that it's just one foot in front of the other.
thank you , very useful informations
repatable textures and geometry ... is ther specific pattern to keep in mind when i want to repeat geometry and textures ...im little bit confused on how to use the tiles and modular pieces ..:\
http://www.thiagoklafke.com/modularenvironments.html
nice !
yup , thats what i need to do ...
this guy shows exactly how he made his replacement doom 3 textures. Basically model and bake, as was already said.
For making the actual environment, work on a strict grid - make a wall panel 128x128, a floor panel 64x64, and so on. Powers of 2. Assemble the world from panels and trims. Quasi-modular.
And don't forget to use a lot of pipes, cables and other curved surfaces - they used patch meshes in Radiant quite excessively.
actualy i found that tutorial few days ago and i just finished the modeling part and im preparing for bake ...
thanks for the help
What I mean is that Doom 3 environments (the most typical techbase ones) are built from prefabricated pieces, elements, of metal or concrete. Such as floor plates, or wall panels.
A lot of these are quadratic or rectangular, because Doom 3 used tiling textures (well, materials) with sizes such as 512x512 or 512x256.
So if you want a Doom 3 style corridor, make the floor and maybe the ceiling from tiles of the same size. Between the floor tiles and the walls, there might be gaps or various kinds of narrow trim. There would be quite a few small stairs etc. to break up the floor height. It is actually quite comparable to Quake 3 and Quake 2 levels.
The walls are often made up of alternating pillars or "ribs" and wall panels, such as in Delta Labs 1. The pillars will be a repeating model placed in regular intervals, and the spaces between them are filled with various metal panels. These are usually angled or inset to look more interesting. A variant of this is to build the wall from simple panels, but inset & angle every second panel. This can be seen in Delta Labs quite often.
From time to time, there might be niches inset into the walls filled with stuff like computers etc. It's really pretty obvious if you walk around the game world for a while.
Apart from that, it's usually room-corridor-room, or corridors that sort of become their own rooms by adding another floor level etc. Sometimes there are setpiece rooms like the reactor and the trench in the Enpro level, or the crane area in the Mars City Underground one. A trick used quite often is to have "bottomless pits" filled with fog so you can't see the bottom.
By "grid" I mean that your elements should relate to each other:
- a wall panel might be the length of 2 floor plates.
- a support pillar might be half the length of a wall panel.
- a door-frame model might be 2 floor panels wide.
- a trim strip might be half the width of a floor plate.
And so on. If you use a typical floor tile as the base for your "grid" size, everything else can match up to it. Standard rooms and corridors are usually completely modular, made up of rectangular pieces, with setpiece areas sometimes using unique terrain models or assets (or simply a kind of module that's not seen so often throughout the game).
Assets such as machines, computers, and props like scattered crates and boxes etc. break up the modular stuff. Add pipes and cables to taste.
The Hell level is an exception because it is largely unique models for the areas in there.
I recommend looking at the original Doom 3 levels in GTKRadiant or DarkRadiant, because then the grid that those editors use might become more apparent. Unlike in a 3D modeling suite, snapping all brushes to the grid (and most of Doom 3 is brushes, aka BSP) isn't optional in Radiant.
Another iconic part of Doom 3 is the lighting. There are quite a lot of luminescent buttons, glowing lights and computer panels and whatnot strewn around the levels, and the lighting is relatively sparse. In Doom 3 , each overlapping light means an additional rendering pass, so they are usually spaced well apart and don't reach very far. I believe katsbits has explanations of Doom 3 's lighting.
a lot of information ! thank you , you sounds like a hardcore doom fan
can you recommand games that has similar settings ... i mean TECH based levels , alot of industrial things etc .... i luv em !!
I'm just an indie dev with a leaning towards environment art... I also like GTKRadiant so looking into Doom 3 was natural. It has recognizable level design, even if not everybody likes it.
Similar games; well, Quake 4, Prey, FEAR, even Bioshock. Quake 1/2 if you're fine with giant brown pixels (there are custom engines and replacement hires content for those if that's your thing.) The indoor areas in Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl such as "Lab X 18" are perhaps remotely similar. Far Cry (the original) also comes to mind although it is a mix of outdoor and indoor levels.
Bioshock is difinitely one the best games i have played ...
Prey 2 was in my (to check) list , didn't find much time to play it ..
the other titles , didn't test them yet , ill give them a try
thank you for the information , it helped me alot