DaveLee

Now these are some terrific back end improvements. I look forward to trying them out. Nice work Josh!

If I could offer another suggestion - it might be a good idea to offer some kind of downloadable "sample tree" without the .max source files. It could be hard for people to tell from the PDFs how high quality the assets actually are.

I'm a big fan of more options. At work we've purchased tree sets before, and it's frustrating when you have to buy 10 trees that you don't want to get the 12-15 trees that you do want. My vote is for smaller packs that give users more options (priced accordingly) along with a "Full package" option that has everything, maybe with a 10% discount compared to purchasing all of the smaller packs individually.

In the last update I was working on laying out everything in the map, especially the roadways and block placeholders for the main buildings. In today's update, I'm going to go over what I've been working on since then, which is the most logical step after roads...rails! But, before we dive in, here is an overview image for Blog #3: One of the biggest steps since the last blog update was to get a modular rail system set up. Based off of that photo shoot I did 2 weeks ago, I created a 12 meter section of old railway. These sections lock together using the Leadwerks grid system to create perfect seamless straight sections of railway. They also have several Level of Detail versions to save polygons (elements like the tie down plates and rail connectors disappear with distance). While not yet finished, I'm also working on curved sections and a switch (not pictured). And of course, if there's a railway there must be an old pile of ties. I have also completed the final terrain texture, a unique cliff texture: A new brick wall with A, B, and damaged version is also now completed. The accompanying debris pile is designed to work with most other damaged brick assets as well. For those of you that have played the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, this next prop will be very familiar. This is a simple barbed wire fence meant to keep curious eyes away from the Zone... and to help keep some of the strange horrors of the Zone inside. These, along with radiation warning signs, will border the map. The dirt road (not seen yet, the dirt ground texture is a placeholder) that winds through the woods to an abandoned house crosses over part of the swamps. I have created an older style wooden and concrete bridge for this road designed for light personal use off of the beaten path. Its timbers have shifted with age and plundering from explorers looking for material for fires or shelter. Finally, a big part of what I've been focusing on is the railroad bridge needed for this map. I decided to build this bridge in modular sections. This will allow users to adjust the length of the bridge as they need to for their own levels. The design of the bridge is largely inspired by this bridge near Chernobyl: It is divided into 4 sections, with each of the main middle sections being 12 meters long: - Middle - Middle with support pillar - End A - End B Here is how the untextured model snaps together inside of the Leadwerks editor: That's all for today. For the next blog post, I'll be texturing the bridge, working on the road bridge, continuing with more railway assets and maybe getting more textured buildings in the editor. Thanks for reading!

Great point Annika! If there's one thing I've learned from my fellow artists it's that the details matter. You could have tons of props, but if they look cloned or uninspiring it can instantly destroy the illusion that you tried to create. To enablerbr, yes, there is actually a way to remove the obvious tiling. If you have a game (such as an FPS with aircraft like the Battlefield series) where you will be above the terrain enough to see the tiling you can open the DDS texture files in Photoshop with MIP maps turned on and edit the smaller MIP maps manually to remove the tiling: http://i209.photobucket.com/albums/bb134/EvilViking13/Leadwerks/The%20Zone/Blog02/mipmaps.jpg

The official TDP of the GTX 480 is 250w under full load. More concerning for me is that the card runs at 95*C (!) when running full tilt. That's a bit hot for my liking. I think I'm going to wait for the 512 SP version (GTX 485?), due out sometime later this year. I've heard it should also run a bit cooler and hopefully cost less.

Thanks for the feedback and comments, everyone! Michael Betke and BrokenPillar brought up some excellent points about the normal maps as well. When I have time, I'll look at tweaking them again.

Hello everyone! It's time for another blog post about The Zone Leadwerks level design project. I'm going to start today's update off with an overview screenshot of the map. I plan on doing this for each blog post so you can easily follow the overall progress week to week. I've been working on setting up the major terrain features as laid out in the planning sketch. Below are screenshots of some of the roads with WIP textures, the swamp next to the military camp, the military camp itself, the creek and graveyard area, the thick woods and house, the two edges of the map with guard towers, the Bober railroad station area, and the destroyed main road bridge among other areas. There are quite a few placeholder trees on the map right now, so don't panic! I'll be optimizing the forests later. As you might have noticed from some of those images, I have continued working on getting some textured buildings in the editor as well. While I'm still sorting out some issues with some of the normal maps, here are a few screenshots of the derelict guard outpost: No game is complete without some crates, and I've been creating a few to populate this level. These are the base models, and I plan on using decals to add different labels to them. More versions and texture varieties are also in the works. And here they are in the interior of the guard outpost: Last weekend I went out to a local abandoned rail depot to take reference images. These will mainly be used to create the railroad beds, rails, ties, and other sections, but I thought you all might find some of them interesting: View part of the railroad depot reference photo shoot. Here is a WIP image of the new railroad bed that I'm working on based off of some of those images: To finish up this blog post I'd like to share how I created a simple prop building for this map. My goal was to use a good texture image that I had on hand to create a nice looking background building without having to create a high poly version to bake normal maps from. I had a texture of a bunker that was roughly a 1:2 ratio in pixel size, and I started by using Photoshop to set up the texture at 2048x1024. With this complete, I mapped it to a cube in 3ds Max and then I actually cut the shape of the building out of the textured cube. Next I re-UVW mapped new sections of the building that had stretched textures. I then used Photoshop to create a faux heightmap for the texture based off of the image. I then used Crazybump to combine an automatically generated normal map with my custom painted heightmap to create this normal map: To finish off the model I added some Ukrainian signs that use a separate texture map. And, finally, here is the final result in the Editor: While it's best to create high-poly models and bake normal maps for important assets, for background assets like this bunker/outbuilding, Photoshopping a heightmap for use in Crazybump can produce nice results while saving time. That's it for this blog post. In the coming days I'm going to be working on more terrain detailing, preparing some of the bridges and rail systems, and getting more textured assets in the editor!

Hello everyone! My name is Dave Lee, and I am a 3D artist and level designer. As Josh mentioned in a recent blog post, he has hired me to create a AAA-game quality environment for the Leadwerks engine — one that really shows off what it's capable of. This environment will be a fictional scene inspired by the real Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. For now it is titled simply "The Zone". While I'm still getting the hang of Leadwerks and the Editor, I've found it pretty easy to just jump right in with only my experience in CryEngine 2 and some studying on the Leadwerks Wiki. So, this blog update is going to be a good sized one! I have drawn out a sketch for the environment, which you can see here: I have also been collecting quite a few photographs from the internet for my "inspiration folder". These are images that I look over to maintain realism. I have uploaded some of them here so you can get an idea of what I'm drawing some inspiration from: Inspiration Image Slideshow Terrain textures were one of my first experiments in the Leadwerks editor. Each of these has a specular map (in the alpha of the diffuse) and a separate normal map. I also did a bit of experimentation with the vegetation painting system, which works great, especially the LOD levels and billboards. After experimenting with some terrain elements in the editor, I dove into the 3dsMax > Leadwerks import process. The first stages of the level is to get some of the rough untextured models into the environment without their textures but at the correct scale. With these untextured models in the Editor and some placeholder block models made at the approximate size I can "block out" the level in its entirety. This will allow me to make sure that I'm staying true to the original concept before I waste time detailing areas that will need to be adjusted on a macro scale later on. Below are some screenshots that show the early stages of the blocking out process with some of the unfinished models: I also worked on getting one textured building in game so I could learn how 3dsMax's materials and Leadwerks interact. You can see my first (and rather simple) textured building, a portable military trailer, below. That's it for this update. Stay tuned as I continue to block out the environment and begin working on more buildings and props!

Thanks for the warm welcome, everyone! I've been watching Leadwerks progress for quite a while now and I'm very excited to be a part of promoting the engine. As you can tell, I'm a huge fan of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. I have a unique vision in mind for a very detailed and realistic scene set inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone that should really show off the capability of Leadwerks! Expect a blog post from me in the near future detailing what I have planned out.

This is absolutely stunning work! Great job Michael. My only critique is that the yellow moss texture of some of those rocks has a bit of noticeable tiling.