Michael Betke

I think this is a interesting survey: http://www.appcelerator.com/assets/Mobile_Developer_Survey_March_2010.pdf

Have you tried Arbuz Exporter? It exports directly to .gmf with a lot of amazing features. It's in the Tools section for download.

In the comments of Joshs Blog we came to the conclusion that a slight blur filter over the SSDO effect would soften the effect in a good performance way. I adjusted the Quality settings and fps get down noticeable. So doing a blur would be better but I dont know how to do this.

Reseting XForms should do the job before export.

Yes absolutly. There will be a even better solution to this very soon. You will be able to take a tour ingame and see the trees. Just waiting for the App.

New pack is up. See first post.

This new features are really nice. Especially a new painting engine is in too as far as I know. I dont know if its worth the upgrade for me. But I can also recommend other free tools like gimp or paint.net with a lot of plugins and stuff for small jobs.

Yes RVL I thought about the same some time ago. But I don't have time/resources or knowledge to do this. Would require a complete shopsystem and I still want to concentrate on contract work and not asset selling.

3d programs use different types and it depends on the artist and how he sets them up. I usually use a 0.1 grid (to get proper grid snapping in all engines) and a metric scaling. Other people use just units and dont know how large the model will be. My models are swapped from one game engine to another and I never had problems. Scaling is also done in the exporter or in the engine (if it has a scale feature). I think there is no other way then using a cheap/free modelling app and do the rescaling work. Or buy matched packs for your engine.

Thanks guys. This is what I also thought. Means more work for me to manage the orders but also a faster release cycle for new packs. After I hit one "milestone" I'll offer a Super-Bundle with more combined stuff in it.

I'm putting together some new vegetation packages at the moment and I'm at the point to choose between offering one big pack with three or fours specimen in one pack. My other consideration is to split the large pack into several ones which cost not so much, so instead of offering 30 tree models in one pack I would offer three packs with 10 trees in it (10 birch, 10 pines, 10 trunks and so on).

I love the win7 start menu. you get latest files integrated into the file launch and other things. Never looked back...

It's coming along nicely Really like this bridge. How did you manage to make the railroad bending modular so it fits for both sides? I always have problems with it.

I really like it. Looks very peacefull and it fits well into your scene. The yellow leaves for example. Not it belongs to Josh.

Means it's cheap/fair priced. On the website the formats are written. I should add it to the .pdf as well. Normally all surce files are included. Means: .max, .psd And of course the exported formats for the specific engine. I will write the LoD triangels into the .pdf too the next days. Wasn't sure if it's needed but its a good idea. As a rule of thumb they are reduced by 50% for every stage until they start to look to reduced. I also will take care of clear naming conventions for the next packs. This one is a little bit of an experiment how the assets are accepted by potential clients. Thats why I reduced them a bit in price.

After some preperation our new Game Development Division is now online. There is a shop for training/assets/level design. We will push the shop further and do additional packages. A Newsletter service will be online in a few days too. So you won't miss a new pack. Benefits: - All assets are Leadwerks optimized. Other engines will follow over the time. - You buy a package once and get updates for free. (Bug fixes, additional engine releases) - They are cheap - No hassles with height and size - AAA quality Don't hesitiate to give us feedback! We are listening closely to our clients to match the needs of the Indy-Scene. Orders will be processed within 24/36h (depends on time-zone). Please make sure you have a valid e-mail which we can use to contact you for updates. For now the "Groundplants 1.x" pack features 20 vegetation models for your projects. The package costs only 19,- € which means not even one Euro per model! Catalog: http://pure3d.de/english-version/pure3d-gameart-division/pdf/Ground_Plants_v1.pdf Supported Engine: Leadwerks Model formats: .max, .gmf Texture formats: .dds, .psd /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// BIRCH TREES 1.x I am happy to announce the release of the second vegetation pack called "Birch Trees 1.x". This time you'l get 16 birch models reaching from small siized 2m up to giantific 20m trees. The game-model pack contains also a texture set for Summer, Autmn and Winter. Grad the pack on our website www.pure3d.de for only 22,-€ which will be the standard price for our tree vegetation packages. Catalog: http://pure3d.de/english-version/pure3d-gameart-division/pdf/Birch_Trees_v1.pdf Specs: Supported Engine: Leadwerks Model formats: .max, .gmf Texture formats: .dds /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// PINE TREES 1.x I am happy to announce the release of the third vegetation pack called "Pine Trees 1.x". This is a completly new Pine set. Some of the trees are known from the Leadwerks GDC 2010 demo. This time you'll get 15 pine trees reaching from small sized 2m up to giantific 20m trees. The game-model pack contains a texture set for different settings. A normal dark green like the GDC demo plus a green freh and semi-dead theme. All in all four different needles and branches textures. Grab the pack on www.pure3d.de for only 22,-€ which is our standard price for tree vegetation packs. Catalog: http://pure3d.de/english-version/pure3d-gameart-division/pdf/Pine_Trees_v1.pdf Specs: Supported Engine: Leadwerks Model formats: .max, .gmf Texture formats: .dds, .psd, tga Some cose-up renderings will be available in a few days if I open the offical pure3d. blog here. /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// After a busy week we are happy to announce the release of our first environment model pack "Rocks and Stones 1.0". It's a huge pack with over 300 MB download size. Beside the 21 rocky and stony models I included all baked AO (Ambient Occlusion) textures, Photoshop and 3ds max (2010) files to this pack so it's easy to do new textures based on them.the models themselfs are made with Mudbox and weight around 6 million polygones before baking the normalmap from them. All textures got unique 2048px skin mehes which can be downscaled if needed. Get the models from our enviornment shop for only 22,-€ again! Don't miss the cataloge: http://pure3d.de/english-version/pure3d-gameart-division/pdf/Rocks_n_Stones_v1.pdf

It's Joshs show. So I wont tell here. But you will notice a clear before/after. The scene doesn't take long to load. 4 to 5 seconds. Worst loading times I had were a testmap with 13.000 mapmodels which took around 1,5 - 2 minutes.

Yes I rendered the HD videos from the levels for Josh with a special recording script. There are some more plans with the Demo. But for testing new code with a fully functional level instead of just testscenes has its advantages. The sign means indeed 50 km/h. It's meant for the forest workers so they know how fast they can drive.

Thanks a lot for your effort. I know you are running very low on sparetime. This is one of the most important tools in the Leadwerks production pipeline so far. EDIT: The manual misses the part of automatic lod creation. Whats the object naming convention for it?

Aggror I would really appreciate if you share the .lua once you did one.

The billboards are looking like a bar because the mesh (corn for example) itself is around 3meters. If you have smaller batches of corn it would look better (more covered) but it also would raise the amount of vegetation-models in your map. And I don't know the limit in LE. Maybe you should consider not using billboard on certain vegetation meshes like the corn.

I am speaking of a color change. No texture change. Look at this and you'll get the idea: http://doc.crymod.com/SandboxManual/Paint.html This is the workflow then: http://wiki.crymod.com/index.php/Layer_Painting_Advanced_Techniques

In other editors you can choose a color which blends over the texture. So you can have your grass texture and blend a brown color over it to turn it into brown grass. Battlefield 2 got a nice system and Crysis too.

Maybe your resolution of the sat-image is to small. I used 2k on a 2k map. A nice and handy feature in Crysis Vegetation editor is the possibility to auto-dustribute vegetation on a certain ground texture. For example you want a grass model on your grass texture. You click it and distribute the vegetation type over the texture. This is nice for really learge maps. You could do several kinds of fields (rice, maize, corn etc..) with one click.

Really good work. I love the terrain and all those Gozmos to play with. Why don't you guys use sattelite images for the terrain? It yould be made to blend from sat-image (far away) to your detail ground texture. The distant fog would support this a lot.