HQDefault's guide to creative mapping

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HQDefault

...what
aa
Aug 6, 2014
1,056
535
Hello :D
So, I'm here to show you how I make maps, and allow you to use my ideas

YOUR DESIGN:
When creating your first alpha, remember that it does not have to be the best it can possibly be. This may stifle your creative process, because you will continuously try to do things that you already know work. Do stupid things! Make some mistakes! Make some neat structures! All you should really think about doing for your first alpha is making the map fun. Otherwise, you will have something like every other map.

YOUR LIGHTING:
I don't care what other mappers say, do your HDR lighting before you forget! If you wait till beta to do it, you already have a specific setup for your lighting, which you have to spend a really long time fixing. It's best to do your HDR lighting properly first and get it over with.

YOUR DETAILING:
A lot of mappers seem to think that there are a bunch of preset themes for detailing to follow. This is BS. Here's what I think people should do. When you start detailing, create some areas that are rather different in theme, but with similarities to tie them together. This is what I did with Hangar, if you were there during playtesting, you may remember a spytech room with a wooden storage room below it. I used these two elements to tie the map together, along with the fact that it was snowy, to create a cheaply-built but overall spytech based facility in a snowy environment, and at the end of the day, it turned out looking really awesome in my opinion!
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Shogun

L6: Sharp Member
Jan 31, 2014
260
220
YOUR LIGHTING:
I don't care what other mappers say, do your HDR lighting before you forget! If you wait till beta to do it, you already have a specific setup for your lighting, which you have to spend a really long time fixing. It's best to do your HDR lighting properly first and get it over with.

What? No. All adding HDR in alpha does is blind everyone with super bright dev textures and makes them not want to play your map.

you may remember a spytech room with a wooden storage room below it.

This isn't a good idea either. It doesn't make sense to mix wood/ mining architecture with spytech/ computers. It is possible to slowly merge the styles together however, look at upwards last or any official CTF map. But a sharp transtition like what described looks messy and in most cases just plain lazy. You wouldn't have a map where the environment went from alpine to a desert all of a sudden, would you?
 
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HQDefault

...what
aa
Aug 6, 2014
1,056
535
What? No. All adding HDR in alpha does is blind everyone with super bright dev textures and makes them not want to play your map.



This isn't a good idea either. It doesn't make sense to mix wood/ mining architecture with spytech/ computers. It is possible to slowly merge the styles together however, look at upwards last or any official CTF map. But a sharp transtition like what described looks messy and in most cases just plain lazy. You wouldn't have a map where the environment went from alpine to a desert all of a sudden, would you?

Umm... A- Not unless you do it RIGHT.

B- That's what I did :|
 

Idolon

they/them
aa
Feb 7, 2008
2,105
6,106
Do what whatever makes you comfortable in alpha. Keep in mind that if you've got the experience of taking a map from alpha to beta/RC already, you can make much more informed decisions on how to create alphas of new maps.
 

Sergis

L666: ])oo]v[
aa
Jul 22, 2009
1,874
1,257
You can probably tell that even in the alpha stage, the above example is more complete than the placeholder light example in almost every way. This is precisely the point!

i would like to note that not being complete is precisely the point of alphas