UnrealEd is a great program to learn, I've been doing quick layouts in UnrealEd, exporting them as .OBJ files and then importing them into Maya to build static meshes.
[ QUOTE ] meh, where I'm at its the same thing. Is he just an idea man now? Or does he actually still get his hands dirty? [/ QUOTE ] I think ideas m... uh game designer. And yeah it's pretty much thesame thing at my company too. I work with Hourences who is pretty famous in the unreal community (and is releasing a book…
I'm actually designing a world editor and various systems for the creation of non heightmapped terrain for a Dark Basic project. Just using this as a learning step, but I have to teach myself environment art from the ground up. I have the advantage of actually designing the system and knowing the ins and outs of what the…
Also, I feel the need to point out that it a lot easier to get into world building from the outset than it is to get into character building - look at the tools. How many games ship with editors? 3dsmax costs £3000 or whatever, and Unreal Tournament costs £30 and you get the editor for free. You can build and texture a…
about the transition from "mappers" to enviromental artists: for a long time as stated before, the split was mostly some guys doing the textures and another one doing the brushwork, layout... The visually best maps were those were the same person would be a very good texture artist, too or had someone else doing work…
Environment work is more typically done with proprietary systems and tools for a given game. For example, Unreal's use of terrain, structures and static meshes is probably very different from the BF2 engine's use of similar tech. Lighting systems can get very complex. It's hard to just create an environment for a game…
This is just my personal experience with try to make none pro environment art A year or so ago I started to make some environment models for a mod . I modeled some tree's and buildings and rocks . I then showed them off on the mod team forum . The same day the character artist showed off his character . I got 2 responses "…
Hehe chill out guys the tone is rising quite a bit for a discussion that is _at least IMO_ very interesting, and that should be used to help converting more people into how cool environnement/mapping art could be, or at least introduce them to. Big up to ror for that long ass foreword very useful I'll repost my old speech…
One Enviro artist normally isn't resposable for everything you see on the screen so its not as easy to pimp as a character. "I did the three buildings on the left, but only textured two of them, oh and the street lamp and the rubble pile are mine". Just to be a dick I'm going to toss this out there. Maybe enviro guys don't…