Been another slow week this week; however I have managed to finish sculpting and painting the terrain for the first level and am now looking forward to getting some props made in the coming weeks to continue to flesh out the environment.
Here are some WIP screenshots of the section I have been working on this week, mainly the valley down to the Hermit’s cave and the route back up again: 
Upper route down to the hermit’s cave
Hermit’s Cave
To make the walk back up the Valley to the next level a bit more visually interesting, I added a small brook which flows through the lower valley from a small underground cave.
I will be also adding the ruins of an old church here.
So basically as far as the terrain is concerned it’s pretty much done, however I will probably keep tweaking it here and there up until the end, but for now im happy with it. I’ve had a few comments about the bareness of the landscape in some areas, this is purely because there are no models in the level yet, and you will see that change drastically over the coming weeks!
Finally, in the free time I managed to find, I also implemented some subtle moving clouds into the skybox and created a nice water effect for the river using a scrolling “$Refract” shader. If that doesnt make much sense, i’ve made a video to better demonstrate these effects:
Very cool stuff Rob! By far the best use of displacements I’ve ever seen in Source.
This looks incredible. The natural erosion in your displacements make this more convincingly real than anything I have seen done with resource hungry modern tech. It looks like the mod is in the best possible hands.
I can’t wait for Dear Ester’s second coming!
Hi ezekel, im currently using the “cloud” material setup in my .vmt as shown below:
“Cloud”
{
“$nofog” 1
“$basetexture” “esther/nature/sky/clouds_001″
“$cloudalphatexture” “esther/nature/sky/cloudalpha_001″
“$cloudscale” “[ 2.05 2.05 2.05]”
“$maskscale” “[ 1 1 1 ]”
“Proxies”
{
“TextureScroll”
{
“texturescrollvar” “$baseTextureTransform”
“texturescrollrate” 0.005
“texturescrollangle” 45
}
}
}
You could easily do it with “UnlitTwoTexture” also
really looking good, even without any structures or models in place.
i’m curious: are your moving clouds created as an animated texture, or an env_sprite, or something else?
Awesome !!! very good job !!