By admin, on November 11th, 2009
Well it’s been a while since my last update, but be reassured I have not been idling during my absence! Today I can finally show you what I have been toiling over this past month, starting with Dear Esther. During the past month or so I’ve been hard at work striving to hit my first milestone, to bring the first level up to a high standard that will be ready for polishing later on, and which will also serve as a visual benchmark for the remaining levels. Basically what this means is that now I have established the style of
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By admin, on September 25th, 2009
Time for another update I think, been a while actually (or at least it feels like that!). So over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on various bits and pieces for the environment, firstly making rock clusters which are scattered around the bay, such as the path from the lighthouse to the beach and the hermit’s cave. I’m still in two minds about using models for rocks like this however as I’m not a big fan of the vertex lighting, even with all the advances of the OB’s per-vertex lighting and self shadowing. I find that the lighting
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By admin, on August 21st, 2009
Hello again! So the past couple of weeks have been rather chaotic with various things going on taking trips out for reference photos, family visiting and advancing another year closer to old age, hence the lack of an update last week. However this means I now have a lot more progress to show off this time around!
Since my last update I have been focusing on getting three things done; firstly creating and applying basic textures for the terrain e.g. rock, sand grass etc, and lastly, painting and sculpting the terrain. In this pass my goal was to create the most
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By admin, on May 17th, 2009
So, one of the biggest hurdles with making a mod like Dear Esther in Source is the rather clumsy displacement system which is used to create terrain and smooth surfaces. To have pixel-perfect seamless and smooth terrain in Source I had to build my maps in a very unique, complicated and time-consuming manner. Everything has to align with each other and be built from adjoining quad faced brushes, if that doesn’t make any sense then maybe this image will:
By building the map in this way (previously mentioned here) it will allow me to have one large smoothly subdivided displacement which
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