Art's Stuff Thread

[ZanderNao]

That secret santa space port is amazing! And I like that there's no ship in it because I can spawn various ships in it, whatever ships I like! That makes it even better! I love the art style, the contrast colors and the flow. Very nice and unique. Are there release plans?

[Noodle]

Whoever got that space port is a very lucky person!

[Artemis]

I did some work for JK2, and I think it's done enough to post some pictures.  This is a map for a new 3 team CTF gametype that Bucky has been developing.  The new team is yellow, and I ended up making most of the new team related assets for it.  The yellow symbol is just a smashed together red and blue symbol atm rather than something new and cool, but it works.

Someone from the JK2 CTF community made a really sick trailer for the new gametype and map when they were first released:  https://youtu.be/N1qeIJd6Gk0

 

...So this was actually a pain to map for, because I decided to have 2 of the bases at a right angle, and the third at a 45 degree angle kinda like a Y shape.  It's worked out ok, and I finally learned how to use the 3rd point on the clipping tool properly, but trying to plan things out and make pieces fit together was a nightmare because of the slanted walls.  A lot of the details were pulled from yavin_trial and yavin_final.

Overhead view from Radiant:

Mid: This is the view coming from yellow base.  There are definitely some weird angles where all the walls meet up, but I tried to cover them up as best I could.

And this is pretty much what's around the entrance to each base, beyond the giant pillars.

Bases: I really wanted to play around with having the entrances/exits for the bases on different floor levels, but it turned out pretty difficult to do something different for each base and still keep things balanced.  Each base has 3 ways in/out of the actual base and 2 ways in/out of mid, like ctf_yavin.

Blue:

Yellow (this is the base at a 45 degree angle):

Red:

Tunnels: These are pretty boring.  I made a modular set of hallways with func_groups (hallway, corner, t-junction, hallway2) and stuck them together, changing the length and slant of the basic hallway to get things lined up.  I didn't bother taking screenshots of all of that.  The blue/red halls are the same, but the yellow ones are a bit different because of the angle.  This actually led to the yellow halls being easier to navigate, which meant I had to go back and try to make blue and red easier too.  Not fun!

 

[ZeroRaven]

@@Artemis
Love the Mirror's Edge map and the HUB map! Definitely getting my creativity flowing, I have a thing for simplistic, artistic, monochromatic, abstract style maps.
Quakes: "You'll shoot your eye out" "Ludonarritive Dissonance" and "Don't Mess with Hexas" are prime examples.

[Artemis]

@@Artemis

Love the Mirror's Edge map and the HUB map! Definitely getting my creativity flowing, I have a thing for simplistic, artistic, monochromatic, abstract style maps.

Quakes: "You'll shoot your eye out" "Ludonarritive Dissonance" and "Don't Mess with Hexas" are prime examples.

Ahhh, I love the "You'll shoot your eye out" map.  Found that like a year ago and I've been wanting to do something similar ever since.  That second map is gorgeous too!

[ZeroRaven]

@@Artemis

Yeah those maps helped peak my interest enough to make my 20 brush map.

How did you do your lightshaders? And are they àctually light emitting or do you use the light entity?

[Artemis]

@@ZeroRaven They emit light!  I've set up basically a rainbow of flat colored textures that have light shaders, as well as the skybox and some other specific textures.  If it's necessary, I'll also use an invisible/nonsolid brush that gives off light, but that tends to look strange in places.  I've used a couple of light entities around lamps and things like that, but I much prefer skybox/texture lights.

This is the current skybox shader, which doesn't cause the multiple shadows effect I was dealing with before (from what I remember), and one of the generic light texture shaders.  I think all of my light shaders need surfaceparm nolightmap in them to prevent a certain error in the console, but that error doesn't bother me enough to fix them yet.  I'm also not an expert with shaders, and while these definitely work like I need them to, Idk if they're efficient or not.

Spoiler

textures/racepack8/sky
{
qer_editorimage textures/skies/sky
q3map_lightimage textures/racepack8/env_skylight
surfaceparm sky
surfaceparm noimpact
surfaceparm nomarks
q3map_nolightmap
//q3map_sunExt 1 .97 .88 1500 8 75 3 8
q3map_sun 1 .97 .88 1500 8 75
q3map_lightsubdivide	512
q3map_surfacelight 	145
//q3map_lightmapfilterradius 0 8
//q3map_skylight 100 2
skyparms - 512 -
{
map textures/racepack8/clouds1
tcMod scale 3 2
tcMod scroll 0.025 0.025
}
{
map textures/racepack8/clouds2
blendFunc GL_ONE GL_ONE
tcMod scale 3 3
tcMod scroll 0.01 0.01
}
}

 

textures/racepack8/rp8_whiteglow
{
qer_editorimage textures/racepack8/base_white
surfaceparm nomarks
q3map_surfacelight 3000
q3map_lightsubdivide 16
q3map_nolightmap
{
map textures/racepack8/base_white
glow
}
}

[Tamlin]

Hi there nice job you've made. Is there any download link to rifl and ilum map? And are they for jka or jk2?

[Artemis]

Hi there nice job you've made. Is there any download link to rifl and ilum map? And are they for jka or jk2?

They're for JKA!  Some maps can be used in JK2 (I think), even if they weren't made for it, but I don't know about those. They're called Trial II and Trial III, located at the bottom of this page: https://shadoworder.com/downloads/

[Tamlin]

They're for JKA!  Some maps can be used in JK2 (I think), even if they weren't made for it, but I don't know about those. They're called Trial II and Trial III, located at the bottom of this page: https://shadoworder.com/downloads/

nice maps but most of textures are not shown in jk2

[Lyo]

Personally, I use many JA maps in JO, with missing textures and correct shaders, they work well.

 

There are just drops of FPS per moment in some huge maps with many curves.

[Tamlin]

they are missing just to many textures in JO to play on them ;/

[Artemis]

Just dropping by to post this very small TFFA map.  Source .map file is included.

Download here.

Images:

Spoiler

 

[Artemis]

I decided to start working on another map, this time a little bit outside of my comfort zone.  It's primarily outdoors (only outdoors right now), and the lighting has not been easy.  I'm using a shader sun and ambient light in the worldspawn for most of it, and it's still turning out pretty dark on the bottom floor, especially on default gamma.  I'll have to tweak it more as I go.  The map itself is based off of some artist's rendition of the hanging gardens of Babylon.  It's currently super blocky and lacking details, but I want to get the shape of the building down before I get too distracted with adding plants and more decorative stuff.  I originally started out with trisoup terrain, but after some trial and error I switched to Blender and exported some questionable, sculpted terrain.  The past couple of days have involved messing with horizon blending, but I've finally gotten that to a point where I feel like I can leave it and work more on the building...  Although I might redo the terrain again entirely later on, Idk.  Water textures/shader are borrowed from Szico's horizon blending tutorial for the time being.

Images:

Spoiler

 

[Xioth]

27 minutes ago, Artemis said:

I decided to start working on another map, this time a little bit outside of my comfort zone.  It's primarily outdoors (only outdoors right now), and the lighting has not been easy.  I'm using a shader sun and ambient light in the worldspawn for most of it, and it's still turning out pretty dark on the bottom floor, especially on default gamma.  I'll have to tweak it more as I go.  The map itself is based off of some artist's rendition of the hanging gardens of Babylon.  It's currently super blocky and lacking details, but I want to get the shape of the building down before I get too distracted with adding plants and more decorative stuff.  I originally started out with trisoup terrain, but after some trial and error I switched to Blender and exported some questionable, sculpted terrain.  The past couple of days have involved messing with horizon blending, but I've finally gotten that to a point where I feel like I can leave it and work more on the building...  Although I might redo the terrain again entirely later on, Idk.  Water textures/shader are borrowed from Szico's horizon blending tutorial for the time being.

Images:

  Hide contents

 

I want to live there.

[AshuraDX]

@ArtemisI'd avoid using ambient light, it adds light on a global level which kills your option of having dedicated dark areas on the map. Try increasing the light bounces in the compiler and try to come up with some neat lightsources for the interior. 

It will most certainly look even better with believeable light. 

 

EDIT: this might be a good use case for a script I made a while ago. The script takes a skybox shader as input, calculates multiple shader suns based on the sky color and spits out a light dome kind of shader that illuminates from all sides with varying lightstrengths and colors.

It was inspired by a script a quake 3 Mapper made for one of his maps in Maya: http://lunaran.com/page.php?id=218

[Artemis]

@AshuraDX I swapped out ambient for a low _minlight value that may or may not be working out alright, and also took screenshots on gamma 1 this go around, instead of 1.25.  At some point I tried using multiple suns in my sky shader, but they were throwing shadows all over the place and obscuring the more defined shadows that I actually wanted.  I'd be up for trying it again, though.

I've compiled it again with these settings, but I'm noticing some weirdness in places.

-light -fast -filter -bounce 4 -bouncegrid -bouncescale 1.3 -dark -patchshadows -samples 2 -shade

These places probably are supposed to be shadowed, but they look kinda buggy:

Spoiler

Then my terrain is getting wrecked by -dark in places, which is unfortunate because this looks cool elsewhere on the map, and I'd rather not have to remove it.

Spoiler

And here are some new overall screenshots; I think I've got the exterior pretty much how I want it, but I still need to break up a lot of the floor space and add details.  Also, apologies for the lack of anti aliasing and jagged lines:

Spoiler

 

[AshuraDX]

@Artemis

A sky shader with multiple suns needs careful balancing in brightness and a fair few suns, just two or three won't really cut it. I used platonic solids as the basis for my lightdomes, first the skybox is converted to a skysphere, then the solid is aligned to the brightes spot on the skysphere with its first vertex. From there the pixel colour of the skyspheres texture is transferred to the solid's vertex colours. Afterwards the brightness values of the vertex colours are normalized and stuck into an exponential expression which yields a factor for the brightness of the sun/light "born" from that specific vertex. This can give very nice results depending on the solid used (which directly correlates to the number of suns/lights) and the skybox textures themselves as well as the exponential expression and chosen max light value. 

I'd suggest using at least 8 bounces and losing the minlight value as that once again washes out your shadows. It shortens your range of brightness by offsetting your black point towards gray. Which helps if your goal is to make everything a playable brightness, but is guaranteed to kill the believability of your lighting since areas that should be unlit will have some mysterious brightness to them. 

I can not remember what -dark did exactly, but I've seen those kind of lighting glitches on terrain without using -dark. Interestingly I didn't see that type of glitch on brushes until now, only on models and patches. If you want to try a brush based version of that terrain let me know and I'll run it through Q3ME for you. 

[Artemis]

@AshuraDX I'm going to attempt that with python and Blender, sounds like a fun learning experience.

I've tweaked my compile settings and did end up replacing -dark with -dirty because the other weird spots were apparently coming from -dark, but that still didn't fix the jagged lines on the terrain.  I also tried q3map_lightmapMergable, different q3map_shadeAngles, q3map_lightSampleOffset, and even just raising/lowering the verts to see if that would do anything, but so far, nope.  The terrain is brushes, but maybe it has to do with how they've been exported from Blender?  They're not the normal trisoup/quadsoup shape, they just have 4 verts apiece.  I can take a look at the script and maybe figure out a way to export them with 6 verts, dunno.

I might need to just take a chunk of my map out and make it a new map so I can test the light settings without compiles taking forever.  With current settings I'm getting 2 bounces in an hour with -fastbounce, so I haven't even had a chance to try 8.

[AshuraDX]

@Artemis

Ah, you're using Pandes Brush export script? 

If you want a trisoup style export you'll have to create a set of offset vertices N Units in negative vertex normal direction.

When it comes to the sides of those brushes you should keep in mind that those need to be split into planes/triangles to maintain a convex shape for the entire brush. If you fail to do this properly you will end up with holes in your brush surfaces which is an issue that can be solved with a bit of math. Message me on Discord if you need some pointers here.

[Artemis]

Taking a tiny break from working on the temple map to do something else.  I don't spend a lot of time on duel1 because it's very dark (and also a duel map), but I do spend a ton of time on ffa3, so... I decided to see if I could just make duel1 look more like ffa3, and it appears that I can.  I hopped onto a server to test it and noticed some weirdness, not sure if it was the server or my map, though.  It could use some more work, I just put the map models back where they were on the original duel1 since I didn't know what else to do that would fit within the clip brushes.  Also, there are a couple of buggy places where there's brushwork in my map and not in the original that I should make nonsolid.

Spoiler

 

[MagSul]

As I was reading the description, I was thinking "That's not gonna look right?"

Well, shows what I know! That looks pretty darn good, actually. Kudos! 

[Artemis]

I swear I'll get back to the temple map eventually, but in the meantime, I've got a couple of other projects I've worked on.

The first is more technical than artistic.  I've used a lot of flat colored pngs in some of my maps, and I decided to simplify them all.  For the flat colored textures specifically, I didn't even need a png to start with, I could just specify the color of $whiteimage with rgbGen const.  So with that, I've got the black/grays/white colors that I need, along with most of the rainbow of other colors, and a variety of glowing textures.  I also wanted to simplify a texture that was mostly gray with a colored border that I use for boxes and jump pads.  I had a separate base texture and glow texture for each color, but I've got it cut down to one gray png with a transparent border and a single glow texture.  The map I tested this stuff in only has 4 custom textures, and a pretty lengthy shader file.

Test map:

Spoiler

Some of the shaders, if anyone is curious.  The one for the squares is probably not the most efficient, and I'll take suggestions to further fix it if anyone has any.  Also I just realized I'm rgbGen const'ing $whiteimage to white in all of the white shaders, which is probably super unnecessary.  Shaders are not my strong suit.

Spoiler

textures/rmg/base_green
{
qer_editorimage textures/rmg/editor/base_green
{
map $lightmap
}
{
map $whiteimage
blendFunc GL_DST_COLOR GL_ZERO
rgbGen const ( 0.39 1.0 0.0 )
}
}

textures/rmg/glow_green
{
qer_editorimage textures/rmg/editor/base_green
surfaceparm nomarks
q3map_surfacelight 3000
q3map_lightsubdivide 16
q3map_nolightmap
{
map $whiteimage
rgbGen const ( 0.39 1.0 0.0 )
glow
}
}

textures/rmg/sqr_green
{
qer_editorimage textures/rmg/editor/sqr_green
q3map_lightRGB 0.39 1.0 0.0
q3map_surfacelight 750
{
map $whiteimage
rgbGen const ( 0.39 1.0 0.0 )
}
{
map textures/rmg/sqr_trans
alphaFunc GE128
}
{
map $lightmap
rgbGen identity
blendFunc filter 
}
{
map textures/rmg/sqr_glow
blendFunc GL_ONE GL_ONE
rgbGen const ( 0.39 1.0 0.0 )
glow
}
}

textures/rmg/jumppad_green
{
qer_editorimage textures/rmg/editor/jp_green
q3map_lightRGB 0.39 1.0 0.0
q3map_surfacelight 1000
q3map_cloneshader textures/rmg/jumppad_efx_green
{
map $whiteimage
rgbGen const ( 0.39 1.0 0.0 )
}
{
map textures/rmg/sqr_trans
alphaFunc GE128
}
{
map $lightmap
rgbGen identity
blendFunc filter 
}
{
map textures/rmg/sqr_glow
blendFunc GL_ONE GL_ONE
rgbGen const ( 0.39 1.0 0.0 )
glow
}
}

textures/rmg/jumppad_efx_green
{
q3map_notjunc
q3map_nonplanar
q3map_fur 2 4 .25
surfaceparm trans
surfaceparm nonsolid
surfaceparm noimpact
cull none
{
map textures/rmg/sqr_glow
blendFunc GL_ONE GL_ONE
rgbGen const ( 0.39 1.0 0.0 )
glow
}
}

 

I also revisited my ysal arena map and redid the texturing on it so it's not cheddar cheese orange anymore.  If you want to compare, there are a couple of screenshots of it on the previous page.

Spoiler

Then I made a functional? instagib map over the weekend.  It hasn't been tested yet, beyond me making sure the team spawns, teleports, and jump pads work properly.  It could still use some tweaks as far as map geometry goes because there's a lot of empty space.  It's also a little bit small, so I might try adding on a room and maybe some CTF aspects.  This map and the ysal map do not have light entities, invisible light brushes, or any worldspawn lighting currently.  They're both taking about 30 mins to compile with -fastbounce, so I'll probably have to do final compiles when I'm actually out of the house for a decent length of time (not right now).  Also, the base sky shader is probably a placeholder until I find a better one.

Spoiler

 

[Bek]

Hi Artemis 

[Captain Leeroy]

temple map or ban