WIP Zephyria Tholus Plateau

Pangaea · Jan 27, 2011

A wireframe sneak peek at the project im working on. .. I would estimate it at 70% complete, another 3 or so weeks of work ide imagine.

I wont give much details untill its publication other then to say its a (very) fictional 17k+ track set in a semi desert/arid mountainous region. The track is 70% gravel, 15%tarmac & 15% sandy concrete.

Sorry about the vid quality, wanted to keep the compression low (my upload speed is a joke).
Some nice ambient music on there too if you care to turn up your speakers.

Next post - will be the final published track

Select 720p or highest at full screen.. mesh is a little hard to see otherwise
direct link:

Barbje_Keller · Jan 27, 2011

Waiting more progress

Pangaea · Jan 27, 2011

every last polygon of terrain is pure btb. no terrain imports at all

Barbje_Keller · Jul 19, 2011

Hi, Pangaea, can you say - how you did light in tunnel? It's very interesting for me. Thank's

Pangaea · Jul 19, 2011

hi Barbje

To get that effect i had to use a few tricks for rbr, but if your working with rf as far as i know most of the tricks i used are not needed since rf has lighting, shadows..etc etc

Anyway.. Its been so long since i did it ill try remember

First of all, all because rbr lights everything in the tunnel using the sky (like the tunnel isnt there) i had to make all the textures in the tunnel very dark.. so in a sense im emulating the darkness by using dark textures. Thats the first trick.
The next isnt really a trick per-say, but the lights them selves are using add/multiply just off white. so they will display in rbr at near pure white not matter what light is shining on it.
The next is to make specific textures for the light reflected on the walls and ground in the tunnel itself. I did this by using the dark textures and brightening them in photoshop, so when put under/beside a light it looks like the light is emanating and reflecting off the walls of the cave.
The next trick (witch u cant see very well in the video) is light beams or haze around the lights... this was made by using a combination of alpha gradient along with add and multiply. I warn you tho, getting it to look right in rbr is a pain, when u stretch the beam or resize it the amount of light from the add/multiply gets messed up. Also these light beams/rays are only 2d and maped onto a wall in the shape of a beam. So its not volumetric in any way.
To make the whole thing look much better i also used ensemberies plugin for rbr at a low setting.

I think thats about it..
I will dig up a few examples of the textures later so u can see what i mean about the lightness/darkness variations.

regards
pan

Barbje_Keller · Jul 19, 2011

Thank's for answer. I see you did realy hard work... But sad, that I can't used yours method in my track (for RBR),

because I have streets floodlight stands in open space... Any way, yours method is interesting for others track creators

Pangaea · Jul 19, 2011

Hey, here are some textures i made showing the dark/light areas

no.1 = this is one of the base materials used for the tunnel walls

no.2 = this is the texture that goes onto the tunnel wall where the small ground lamps are.

no.3 = this is half of a texture for the bigger tunnel roof lights... i doubled this up in the tunnel then flipped the texture so its double the length.

no.4 = This is the base road texture (notice how dark it is)

no.5 = This isthe texture used under the small ground lamps.

no.6 = Like no.3 this is half of the road texture for the roof lights, flipping the texture to make it double up.

as explained in the first post, the lights themselves are simply a white texture using add and multiply so they look bright in the game.. the alpha gradient used for beams is a little more complicated to explain.. its a trial and error thing

just make sure when ur making them in ps, that you dont "feather" the light patches so they fall outside the image canvass.. it will leave horrible seams in the game.