CP artpass_beamos

[coagulated]

If you're going for a look which involves exposed lava, I'd advise that you go for a more clean metal look than grungy because it gives off a better evil lair aesthetic. Having grunge and lava together is reserved only for industrial metal music videos.

And yeah, I fecking love how this theme is coming along.

 

[Beamos]

Well, BLU was going to have that more sterile aesthetic, which is why RED's a little bit on the dirty side. Since I really can't use any non-decorative wood, I need to differentiate between RED and BLU somehow. Sterility, angular/curved are how I'm going about doing that.

Speaking of angular:

Hahaha, idk if I'll stick with this. I wonder if it's going too far. If I don't stick with this, if it's going too far, I'll merge the various panels on the left into one large panel (or restyle them so they convey some kind of utility) and rework the ceiling into... uh... I'll keep the ceiling rails, but remove the metal panes covering them and maybe stick some lights onto the railings.

Or maybe I ought to stop listening to techno + house when I'm mapping.

edit: Now that it's morning, I've decided to drop the ceiling panels and edit the left side. Looks teh ugz.

 

[Beamos]

If I get a chance after the rest of the map is pretty much done, I'll tweak the lighting more. The hall feels a bit fullbright-ish, but it's not that bad that it warrants me to go back right now and fix up that lighting.

Now to work on the rest of point C, and then the fun part, area B and the B-C transition! That'll be fun. That and RED spawn. Implementing ideas is always fun <3

 

[Keonyn]

I kind of like how you did the original ceiling, it was quite unique. The wall on the left definitely looks much better this way though.

 

[Beamos]

Thanks for the feedback. I ended up ditching the first ceiling since I was getting a few comments that it was like something from portal.

Anyways, three hammer screenshots~ I would have posted ingame screenshots, but frankly, I won't DARE compile this until I've got everything func_detailed that should be. Also, please don't mind any texture/overlay oddities you might see, like rotated and shrunken textures. Just a little bug that can occur in hammer when I have glass on the map.

Working on detailing the second floor walkway's underside:

Red spawn window (I couldn't resist the sewer cap window looking into spawn! ><):

Inside red spawn:

For red spawn, I will be changing the right exit so you have to go through a 90o turn to access the respawn room. As it is right now, players can look directly into spawn from the right door, which isn't what I want.

 

[Beamos]

Point C building nearing completion, then to work on point B:

 

[Goombac]

Oh my, that is red. Maybe a bit too red. But it looks amazing. Although the angled overhangs along the wall next to the lava waterfalls looks like the textures should be angled as well, instead of just standard.

 

[tyler]

It looks very suffocating, and I think that could work.

 

[Tinker]

It looks good, but rather clean and sterile so far - and TF2 isn't very clean and sterile, ever. Consider putting more spytech around the place to break up the concrete a little. (Maybe you already did, but I can't see it from the screenshot.) That said, that's one impressive building, whatever it's for.

 

[grazr]

You really need to work on making those arches smoother/cleaner curves. The amount of red light also worries me about how much it will impact team recognition.

 

[Beamos]

Thanks for the responses everyone.

I'll go ahead and tweak the red lighting saturation.

Regarding the curves, I must be misunderstanding how smoothing groups work, since I keep having issues getting them to function properly. For some reason, any 45o angle is a hard face instead of smoothed, even if it's flagged for the same smoothing group as the other faces for that column. Any non-45o angled face apart of a single smoothing group smooths properly. I'll have to figure out what's going on later.

Edit: A picture of one of the columns in hammer, since the problem might be with brush geometry:

 

[Draco18s]

I've had some trouble with smoothing groups too, I've got some...16? sided cylinders (logs) that won't smooth.

Looking up on the wiki it says that the lightmap scale needs to be dense enough that at least one light luxel fits on each surface.

 

[Beamos]

Thanks, I'll try that out as well as check out the wiki page on smoothing groups.

 

[grazr]

http://www.snarkpit.net/snarkpower/articles/game/cat/pn/tp/31/Arch_Tool
http://www.snarkpit.net/snarkpower/articles/game/cat/pn/tp/138/Clipping_Vs._Carving

 

[Beamos]

Oh wow, thanks for the links. I'll go ahead and try that different methodology of making arches. Before I was just clipping a single brush until a semi-curved region could be deleted from the brush to form an arch.

 

[grazr]

Vertex Manipulation all the way. Learn it well.

Also, you might wanna update your OP's images with your latest screen shots. It doesn't set a good example of your progress, those two icey cavern like wall pics.

 

[Beamos]

I decided to test out (and ultimately abuse) the links grazr gave me

Sooooo ugly, but I don't really care at this point. If I think up anything better, I'll implement it.

 

[J4CK8]

Those textures make it look like it should be BLU's building. Point C is nice, but very red, which might give players trouble when trying to make out whether a player is on BLU or RED.

 

[Goombac]

I think those orange stripes (although pretty) would look better as red stripes.

 

[Draco18s]

I agree. The orange does look nice, but it has a "dev texture" feel to it, and honestly, should be red.