Lionhardt's WIP Mapping Thread

[Franck83]

Didn't see all your maps, but i really love your work on Goodlands Lionhardt. The blending between tone and colors, tree and minerals props, textures is just amazing. This is professional level work.

[Lionhardt]

Well, thanks a lot.



Some progress on new map: started detail texturing and decaling:

10.JPG (144.79 KiB) Viewed 2906 times

Actually that is something I can give another recipe about. I did shading with semi transparent strata here.

Compare:

10_compare.JPG (148.22 KiB) Viewed 2904 times

As you can see there is a stratum that blends shades from the edges of the rifts.

The left mask is the bright sand and the right mask is the shading mask:

shading.jpg (20.63 KiB) Viewed 2904 times

[Franck83]

About your work on Hexagonian Drylands

I'm not enough skilled to give tactical point of view, but i can give you my newbie feeling. There are a lot of tension points because of the multiple ways. You can build a lot of small bases. Artillery seems play a huge role especially if we control high height positions.

In an aesthetics point of view, it's a mineral map. The work on decals is very nice. Really love the sandy feeling of center map and low height positions.
As a general feeling, i would prefer natural map effects. I know that heighmap is referring to hexa board game type. I think you can introduce some diversity in relief proportion or some big point of interest.
The mineral seems a little too glossy especially near trees. Maybe adding a texture change under trees to blend well and add a more natural effect. To connect well trees and ground.

Otherwise, this is a good quality work.


Fervent Soil and Torrid Suns is my prefered of the two.

It's an closed arena type map. Here too controling high height center positions gives the key to center map control. It seems that air domination has a great role here because if you loose the center, you can only access by air.
In an aesthetics point of vue, the work of decals is just amazing (barren types, meteorits impacts...). The progressive blend of tone between the bottom and the top of hills is crazy nice.
Really love the brown tone of the botton center of map. It's less tiresome for eyes than high height parts.


In an aesthetics global point of view, the natural feeling, my prefered map is still Goodlands !

Was fun to review, hope this help !

[Lionhardt]

I will see if I can do something about that glossiness.

I think you can introduce some diversity in relief proportion or some big point of interest.

I don't understand. Can you rephrase that? You are talking about gameplay related heightmap stuff, right?

[ozonex]

Actually that is something I can give another recipe about. I did shading with semi transparent strata here.

[...]

As you can see there is a stratum that blends shades from the edges of the rifts.

The left mask is the bright sand and the right mask is the shading mask:

I made similar example to this year ago, but using Ambient Occlusion. I imported heightmap to Maya and baked AO and then used it with dark stratum texture. Then I baked Curvature map and applied it to bright stratum. It given much more depth to mountains.

In addition you can also make big decal that will contain additional colors and shades. FA map SCMP017 has something like that. It has global decal in Env/RedBarens/Decals/RB_SCMP017_Macro_albedo.dds. It gives control over details in strategic view. You can use it to add more light/shadow or noise/detail to certain areas.

Also open palms has snow that is just big decal, but they used that because of limit of TTerrain shader.

[Lionhardt]

Interesting. That is why the snow on Open Palms disappears when you zoom out far enough.

Yes right, basically what I did there is a form of poor man's ambient occlusion. How did you do the process you describe there? What tools did you use? Can you link me the example you speak of?

[ozonex]

Interesting. That is why the snow on Open Palms disappears when you zoom out far enough.

Yes right, basically what I did there is a form of poor man's ambient occlusion. How did you do the process you describe there? What tools did you use? Can you link me the example you speak of?

I used Autodesk Maya. I imported heightmap to a hi-poly plane mesh and then I baked AO and Curvature to texture using Maya renderer. Then I tuned them up a little in Photoshop to have proper range.

Before:

After:

[Lionhardt]

I see, cool. But unfortunately this is no use as long as custom resources are not supported by the client.


(the images don't show, btw.)

[ozonex]

I see, cool. But unfortunately this is no use as long as custom resources are not supported by the client.

(the images don't show, btw.)

Why custom resources are not supported? I'm now finishing custom files support in editor.

try these links:
https://slack-files.com/T02T320UA-F5TKNJWFR-6b9fc6f061
https://slack-files.com/T02T320UA-F5TK46DPY-7024b06811

[Lionhardt]

But the FAF client does not support them. They need to be placed in the gamedata folder, afaik.