After being preoccupied with Unity, UDK, and other engines for a long time I've become hooked on Cryengine. If you love creating game worlds and haven't tried CE3, I highly recommend downloading the free version here- http://mycryengine.com/
Make your own dev account for free and you'll find answers to pretty much any questions imaginable here- http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC2/Home - and here - http://www.crydev.net/
Since the SDK became available for free the forum has grown to a powerful resource to any developer.
I've decided to make a larger scene based around a character that I started some time ago, an adventure-type medieval archer. My plan is to make every asset custom and not use any of the assets that come with the editor. That way I'll push myself to learn the engine and make the scene entirely my own. I jump through a lot of different steps here and might fail to explain in depth everything I do. But if you have any questions I'm happy to answer!
Make your own dev account for free and you'll find answers to pretty much any questions imaginable here- http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC2/Home - and here - http://www.crydev.net/
Since the SDK became available for free the forum has grown to a powerful resource to any developer.
I've decided to make a larger scene based around a character that I started some time ago, an adventure-type medieval archer. My plan is to make every asset custom and not use any of the assets that come with the editor. That way I'll push myself to learn the engine and make the scene entirely my own. I jump through a lot of different steps here and might fail to explain in depth everything I do. But if you have any questions I'm happy to answer!
My character is wearing wool pants similar to the Thorsberg trousers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorsberg_moor), leather boots and a long sleeveless shirt. He wears a heavy gambeson-like chest piece and much of his face is obscured under a dark hood made from wool. His bow is a long recurved ash self bow with bone tips and in a back-quiver he carries a dozen heavy wooden arrows.
He lives in Scandinavia during the migration period (500AD). It happened that Germanic warriors went south to fight in the Roman army or with opposing forces and brought objects and knowledge back if they returned home. With this in mind I gave him some valuable items like the seax and quiver. The belt is nordic, he probably stole it though he says it was a gift.. Other than that I wanted his overall appearance to be pretty low class.
If I am going to spend a lot of free time on the project I want to really love every aspect of the motif, so I'll make it heavily inspired by Sweden, my home country. I'll aim to make the scene a miniature version of a county which includes both boreal forest and bare rock above the treeline. My goal is to make the terrain for the landscape, pose my character, and make enough meshes and vegetation to populate a few screenshots. I'm fighting off some outrageous ideas bubbling of making all kinds of flora and fauna to populate an entire landscape, but for this project I'll aim lower..
To make the heightmap and colormap for the terrain I work with 3ds Max and World Machine - if you haven't tried World Machine yet, check out the amazing tutorials on youtube. You can pick up a copy at http://www.world-machine.com/ - it's a sweet tool for simulating geomorphology.
After a couple of test scenes it seemed this scene should be 1024x1024. That way it doesn't feel too cramped compared to a 512x512, and I can fit a small mountain range on one side and forest on the other without having to design and populate huge expanses like a 2048x2048 scene in case I want to make it a complete level later.
He lives in Scandinavia during the migration period (500AD). It happened that Germanic warriors went south to fight in the Roman army or with opposing forces and brought objects and knowledge back if they returned home. With this in mind I gave him some valuable items like the seax and quiver. The belt is nordic, he probably stole it though he says it was a gift.. Other than that I wanted his overall appearance to be pretty low class.
If I am going to spend a lot of free time on the project I want to really love every aspect of the motif, so I'll make it heavily inspired by Sweden, my home country. I'll aim to make the scene a miniature version of a county which includes both boreal forest and bare rock above the treeline. My goal is to make the terrain for the landscape, pose my character, and make enough meshes and vegetation to populate a few screenshots. I'm fighting off some outrageous ideas bubbling of making all kinds of flora and fauna to populate an entire landscape, but for this project I'll aim lower..
To make the heightmap and colormap for the terrain I work with 3ds Max and World Machine - if you haven't tried World Machine yet, check out the amazing tutorials on youtube. You can pick up a copy at http://www.world-machine.com/ - it's a sweet tool for simulating geomorphology.
After a couple of test scenes it seemed this scene should be 1024x1024. That way it doesn't feel too cramped compared to a 512x512, and I can fit a small mountain range on one side and forest on the other without having to design and populate huge expanses like a 2048x2048 scene in case I want to make it a complete level later.
CE3 heightmap --> World Machine-
This time I started by roughing out the level using the terrain editor in CE3. This way I can get some textures on the ground early on and get a sense of the scale between landmarks when running around in game. Once I've roughed out terrain, I export the heightmap as a BMP and can either keep sculpting finer features using Mudbox or Zbrush or directly move on to World Machine.
This time I started by roughing out the level using the terrain editor in CE3. This way I can get some textures on the ground early on and get a sense of the scale between landmarks when running around in game. Once I've roughed out terrain, I export the heightmap as a BMP and can either keep sculpting finer features using Mudbox or Zbrush or directly move on to World Machine.
In WM I'm going to use my heightmap from CE3 as a file input. For filters I add a terrace and erosion. I'm expecting the terrain to be heavily modified in CE3 so I don't go too crazy getting everything perfect in WM. I did set up a range of colors, but I use it more as a guide for when I make my color map in Photoshop.
This is the device view I ended up with.
Once I'm happy with my build I export my height map as a .PGM, my colormap in a BMP output, and export all my erosion maps as seperate BMPs using heightmap outputs.
In my PSD I use each map (flow, deposits, wear) as alpha for a specific color and tweak them by checking on the terrain in CE3.
To apply my heightmap I open the terrain editor and choose file/import heightmap. The height map must be the same dimensions as my terrain, in this case 1024x1024. I usually have to hit Modify/Reduce range a few times.. Now I can apply my BMP color map by going to Terrain/Import/Export terrain texture. Default tile size is 512x512, but I am going to use a 2048x2048 so I click the square and change the resolution to 2048x2048. Now I can import my color map and check it in game.
This is the device view I ended up with.
Once I'm happy with my build I export my height map as a .PGM, my colormap in a BMP output, and export all my erosion maps as seperate BMPs using heightmap outputs.
In my PSD I use each map (flow, deposits, wear) as alpha for a specific color and tweak them by checking on the terrain in CE3.
To apply my heightmap I open the terrain editor and choose file/import heightmap. The height map must be the same dimensions as my terrain, in this case 1024x1024. I usually have to hit Modify/Reduce range a few times.. Now I can apply my BMP color map by going to Terrain/Import/Export terrain texture. Default tile size is 512x512, but I am going to use a 2048x2048 so I click the square and change the resolution to 2048x2048. Now I can import my color map and check it in game.
My idea is to have three meandering water streams flowing from the mountains and merging in the left of the image. It could be a nice way to section off my different areas and I'm planning to lay out occlusion zones along the river banks.
Here is the terrain texture after some tweaking and layer painting in CE3. The background mountains are seperate meshes, also created using WM and then retopoed.
The terrain itself is really only a rough base because it will ultimately be pretty drowned by environment assets. There's only so much you can do in terms of shapes with the terrain and it quickly becomes apparent up close. Skyrim does a great job at building entire mountains using meshes and I'm hoping to try something similar with this map.
For now this is a good starting point for checking my meshes.
Here is the terrain texture after some tweaking and layer painting in CE3. The background mountains are seperate meshes, also created using WM and then retopoed.
The terrain itself is really only a rough base because it will ultimately be pretty drowned by environment assets. There's only so much you can do in terms of shapes with the terrain and it quickly becomes apparent up close. Skyrim does a great job at building entire mountains using meshes and I'm hoping to try something similar with this map.
For now this is a good starting point for checking my meshes.