MattWBradbury

This engine is quite complex, but there are far more complex map editors out there. Half Life 2's source engine had tons of physics including: ropes, welds, sliders, friction, elastics, ballsocets, magnets, and even thrusters. Doom 3 is more based on static environments filled with realistic lighting. The only thing is the size of maps. Games like Half Life 2 and Doom 3 have relatively small map sizes compared to games like Grand Theft Auto III where you have miles and miles of map. It is always going to be quality vs. quantity.

Here are some screen shots from the Doom 3 garage I am translating into A:M. [attachmentid=14660] [attachmentid=14661] [attachmentid=14662] The guys at ID software really know how to make a cold and dingy atmosphere. There are decals that I have not yet placed on the garage floor, and there are also objects in the room that I have not created yet. The aspect of the Doom 3 engine I like the most is that all of those shadows are real time. I could move the light around the room and everything would update their lighting. These screen shots are what I would like to see in A:M real time, but that would take a lot of time to write, and the the A:M team already has enough work to do. This is what the editor looks like if any of you were interested. The project is fairly simple; it just entails a lot of decaling and correct alingments which can be very time consuming. [attachmentid=14663]

Okay, here's the render. You can see what I mean by the noise I mentioned eariler today. This is due to final gathering. Total render time was 14 hours! I edited the render in photoshop by using the dust and scratches noise remover; it worked quite well. Total noise reduction post effect time .37 seconds!

I've done my own rooms and textures before. This time around I wanted to see what A:M's photon mapping could do to a scene from Doom 3. The Best way to do that was to recreate the garage and apply radiosity to it. The only thing is, this process of recreating the garage is taking a long time. I have already increased my skills of decaling by twenty fold! I will build my own room with my own textures after I see how this turns out. I am rendering a scene with radiosity, and currently on pass number twelve, there are spots everywhere. I will probably not use final gathering for any further renderings because of the noise it creates. I'll post it when it finishes.

I did some more decaling on the cieling and the walls. I expect that decaling will take about another twenty hours to finish. I'm already up to seventy textures, and around one hundred decals. I like the way that this is turning out. Maybe I'll recreate one of their security guys to sit in the scene, though I do not have much skill in modling a human. Here is what I have so far. I'm going to tackel the giant white wall in the shot next.

When the texturing is finished you won't be able to tell there are sharp edges on everything. The textures in Doom 3 all of local maps (normal maps) that make the geometry appear as though it were beveled. The main point of this project is to perfectly replicate the garage as possible. That is why I made the pipes have peaked edges.

Here's the renders. I'll add more textures today. The radiosity looks a little wiered because I didn't use final gathering.

Thanks for the complement Martin. I find peace in knowing that my mind doesn't just drone away at video games all day. The only challange I'm going to face in recreating this garage perfectly is the lights themselves. Doom 3's rendering engine uses square lights (Light falls off at different values in the XY and Z Plan). Some lights have very odd forms to them like a trapizoidal prysm with the center of the light off from the center of the prysm. I'm going to render a radiosity render overnight just to see how it's doing. The decaling is no where from being complete, but because I'm using only one light, the radiosity shouldn't over expose the diffuse color of the model.

I didn't have much time to texture any of the patches though I did manage to get a quick render out to see how things were coming. From the render, I know that I need to reverse some normal maps. The hazard strip normal maps are defininatly in reverse.

So are you going to add all of the bolts too? The only thing stoping me from making modles super mega ultra huge in scale and patch count is the stability of my computer.

I have always wanted to see what doom 3 would look like if I rendered it with radiosity. The game engine does not have any baking for lighting, so every light is ray traced. I've used the editor to take measurements of the garage I wanted to recreate, and I'm using textures from Doom 3 for all of the surfaces. The entire geometry took me around twelve hours to input into A:M, but the results are already very cool. Here is a render that I did yesterday with photon mapping but with no texturing. [attachmentid=14610] Since the image was rendered, I have added railing, more pipes, wires in the back area, and a few textures. The animation shows the room a bit better. I would have stoped at the matte white model to check radiosity, but I realized that the scene was intensly bright. By adding dark textures to the surfaces, the photons will become darker and radiosity will look more natural. Partially_Textured.mov

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This isn't going to involve coconuts is it?

What in blue-blazes am I looking at here? Is this a planet with rings like Saturn? Looks How long did it take you to render this at that distance?

Could anyone do a quick Newton Physics test for me? Take the holed cylinder and the long rectangular cube, and put both of them in a choreography, and make the cylinder a dynamic object, and the rectagular cube a static object, then calculate the Newton physics. I have had no luck with trying to get holed-cylinders to calculate correctly. Thanks to anyone who helps. Newton_Model_Test.zip

I was experimenting with the Newton Physics in v13 Alpha and found that it is working much better than before. In the attached movie clip you can see several oddly shaped objects falling on top of each other. The lighting is done with Ambient Occlusion and took 33 minutes to render. To set up a sequence like this make any object like a ball and throw it into the choreography. Next you are going to have to set which objects will be used in the simulation. To do this click an object you want to use in the simulation. Go to Plug-in Properties, then Newton Dynamics, and turn Use in Simulation to On. Then you are going to set whether it is a static object or a dynamic object. Do this for every object. Remember that the ground needs to be in the simulation or else everything will fall through it. Once you've got everything into position right click on the Choreography and go to Plug-ins and Simulate Newton Physics. The most important thing to know about Newton Physics is that the default center of gravity is at the origin. If you moved the object away from the origin you'd find that you get some very odd physics when you simulate your sequence. Another thing that you want to do is make sure that your normals are pointed outward so that collision detection doesn't mess up during simulations. Fall.mov

Finally Sweeper can be mine!

Did you use the displacement foot print plug-in for v13 Alpha to do the foot prints?

Are you going to model Jak too? Or how about a jetpack?

Let me guess; sweeper doesn't come in the alpha version.

If it's going to be a rock slide you could use newton physics to help you get a general idea of how the rocks would fall, or you could just use the physics movements in your animation.

You could use the same sprite emmiter to emmit the spalshes as the water hits the valley wall. From the animations I wouldn't think that the rocks would not have been jetted up in the air; rather, they would most likely want to be projected forward towards the camera like the wood debress.

How did you achieve this effect?

You could put your earth in the star field from Julian. I don't know if it works in these newer versions.

I couldn't find any greyscale topography maps; however, I did find many colored topography maps. In fact here's the site which has the entire earth as a colored topography map. Just click on the second of earth you want to see the topography of and click it again to get a really big image of it. I'm currently thinking of a way to use photoshop to convert these colors into greys so that they can become height maps. But like most colored topography maps, they felt that it was nessisary to add diffuse shading to the mixture. You can see what I'm talking about on the Atlantic Sea Wall in this image. This image is a smaller version.