Since the discovery of cement artists have desired to create building-sized art pieces to push the boundaries of their medium and show off in a very humble and modest way, but they have been shackled by the laws of land ownership with extravagant magnates and humble farmers alike prohibiting the development of buildings on their property unless you can guarantee that some twenty something violent lunatics will paint your meticulously designed pristine walls with various body fluids. It seemed like the medium was gonna go the way of other cement-based art forms like Cement Baking and Cement Fashion. But that's all in the past now as we have developed a new way to get undeveloped buildings to you ready to be prettied up in all of your favourite building materials and architectural styles, so grab your hammer, put on your finest cement shoes and get ready to detail!
Welcome to Art Pass Club! A space to practice your detailing skills with no pressure, Art Pass Club will provide a VMF every week-ish for people to detail, be they a newcomer wanting to learn the ropes or an experienced mapper looking for a framework to experiment with. There are no rules to follow or contests to win and you are free to use what you create in any of your other map projects. Even feel free to go back to weeks you missed or revisit weeks you've done before with a new idea. This is all for fun and practice, so don't sweat any deadlines or complications.
Each week you will be given a VMF file of an in-bounds area and a brief. The brief will give a general idea of what you'll be detailing and the difficulty of the task (difficulty represents the size of the base layout and how complex or unorthodox it is). You can just do the area provided in the VMF but you are free and encouraged to create and detail surrounding in bound and out of bound areas. You are free to alter and replace the geometry as you see fit, but do try to keep the general layout similar.
Files will be posted in a collection of folders in the VMF Pile Google Drive created by ABP and have the following naming convention for easier sorting:
apc_[season number][week number]_[area reference]_template
So for example of what a VMF file might be named:
apc_0101_spawnroom_template
“apc” stand for Art Pass Club. The Season Number and Week Number will be different for each prompt (don't ask me how long a Season is, this is mostly for future proofing). The Area Reference will refer to what the general idea of the purpose of the area you are detailing is (like a spawn room or a flag room) and will be used more than once since the Season and Week Numbers handle nuanced sorting. When there is a sufficient backlog of weeks you can use the Area Reference to quickly search for weeks about a specific area if you are searching for a file to detail or examples by other people without reading each week's brief.
When you save your own VMF file, I suggest replacing the word “template” with your username or whatever else you feel appropriate, so for this example I might name the file:
apc_0101_spawnroom_papershadow
The VMF file will have some logic elements inside (like spawns, simple lighting, a spectator cam, .etc) in case you wish to compile the map and check it out in game first. For elements that are usually team filtered, like spawn points or doors, they will be available to Any Team unless they have to belong to a specific team, like a Flag or Capture Point. You are free to alter the team allegiance as you see fit. The Spectator Cam is used to create the cover image of any given week, so keeping that in the same location will let you create a comparison image of your finished work.
When you are finished and happy with your work, feel free to post an image or two in this thread or the week's folder in the VMF Dump (or the TF2Maps Discord, though that would make it harder to find, or anywhere that'll accept them I guess), or even share your finished VMF files if you are okay with people using them. Have fun!
Welcome to Art Pass Club! A space to practice your detailing skills with no pressure, Art Pass Club will provide a VMF every week-ish for people to detail, be they a newcomer wanting to learn the ropes or an experienced mapper looking for a framework to experiment with. There are no rules to follow or contests to win and you are free to use what you create in any of your other map projects. Even feel free to go back to weeks you missed or revisit weeks you've done before with a new idea. This is all for fun and practice, so don't sweat any deadlines or complications.
Each week you will be given a VMF file of an in-bounds area and a brief. The brief will give a general idea of what you'll be detailing and the difficulty of the task (difficulty represents the size of the base layout and how complex or unorthodox it is). You can just do the area provided in the VMF but you are free and encouraged to create and detail surrounding in bound and out of bound areas. You are free to alter and replace the geometry as you see fit, but do try to keep the general layout similar.
Files will be posted in a collection of folders in the VMF Pile Google Drive created by ABP and have the following naming convention for easier sorting:
apc_[season number][week number]_[area reference]_template
So for example of what a VMF file might be named:
apc_0101_spawnroom_template
“apc” stand for Art Pass Club. The Season Number and Week Number will be different for each prompt (don't ask me how long a Season is, this is mostly for future proofing). The Area Reference will refer to what the general idea of the purpose of the area you are detailing is (like a spawn room or a flag room) and will be used more than once since the Season and Week Numbers handle nuanced sorting. When there is a sufficient backlog of weeks you can use the Area Reference to quickly search for weeks about a specific area if you are searching for a file to detail or examples by other people without reading each week's brief.
When you save your own VMF file, I suggest replacing the word “template” with your username or whatever else you feel appropriate, so for this example I might name the file:
apc_0101_spawnroom_papershadow
The VMF file will have some logic elements inside (like spawns, simple lighting, a spectator cam, .etc) in case you wish to compile the map and check it out in game first. For elements that are usually team filtered, like spawn points or doors, they will be available to Any Team unless they have to belong to a specific team, like a Flag or Capture Point. You are free to alter the team allegiance as you see fit. The Spectator Cam is used to create the cover image of any given week, so keeping that in the same location will let you create a comparison image of your finished work.
When you are finished and happy with your work, feel free to post an image or two in this thread or the week's folder in the VMF Dump (or the TF2Maps Discord, though that would make it harder to find, or anywhere that'll accept them I guess), or even share your finished VMF files if you are okay with people using them. Have fun!
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