Here where a thousand
captains swore grand conquest
Tall grasses their monument.-Basho
That’s a Haiku. Translated by some dude named Beilenson, who believed firmly that it was better to catch the majority of the meaning of a Haiku than to follow its original rhythm. I agree. Our language doesn’t sound like Japanese and more importantly, it doesn’t look like Japanese when it’s written down. All of which is beside the point. The point is grass.
We have some really nice grass, moss, rock and dirt textures. If you detach the camera in Valhalla and go zoom in on the ground, it looks like a photograph. But if you detach the camera and simply pull back, the illusion is lost completely. Suddenly it looks like video game ground. The trick to softening those glossy, glassy, eminently polygonal surfaces, is to add decorators. Small objects placed strategically to give the appearance of reality. In the case of Valhalla, that means a lot of shrubs, ferns, gorse and grass.
In the screenshots you’ve seen so far, not one single stem of organic stuff is in there. It’s a plain more barren than any steppe or fen. Without those things, without depth of foliage and undergrowth, a level can look a little lifeless. Right now, the artists are at the stage of implementation. Most (if not all) of the creation and experimentation has been done. The tools to implement these things are complete and the artists can begin to “paint” their levels with this loamy, grassy stuff.
The first examples I’ve seen so far are Valhalla, and one of the Campaign levels. Ironically in the case of the latter, most of the growth was placed on buildings, rather than sod. Weeds spreading through an abandoned and ruined facility, and vines twisting and strangling their way in from an encroaching forest. And lots of moss. Read the rest of this entry »
Publicat de Eduard Enoiu 
Publicat de Eduard Enoiu 
Publicat de Eduard Enoiu 