Have finished the Powerplant arena. Not many problems from start to finish. Finished Mantis model fixes and his first skin. Again not many problems from start to finish. Mainly problems have been coming from older arenas like the city arena and the desert arena. Going back to revamp the arenas in the editor gets really hard when there are dozens of classes and modifiers that have been completely done away with or consolidated into new forms. The city was and still is in some parts a total wreck. Everything works and looks great, the problem is that the structure is old and there are many floating classes that no longer have uses. This is easily fixed by simply going in and cleaning house. I will be doing this while working on a new arena, the Iceberg Arena. I have the geometry laid out and the environment laid out and now have a great batch of starting textures to replace the temp textures. The starting textures are the first incarnation of the final textures. If the starting textures look solid throughout development of the arena they will instantly become the final textures. This way I can leave the door open to inspiration in the middle of development. I have to say going from hand drawing or searching for useful images to make textures out of, to making all textures with procedural maps and geometry in MAX has been awesome. I think that all textures should be rendered textures and I am currently working out a way to switch all character models over to rendered textures as well. I can’t understand other game artists wanting to hand paint skins and wall textures. Its slower not as efficient and never looks as real or as clean as a rendered texture. Especially for environments. Some developers make there artists use digital cameras to get textures then fix them up a bit in a paint program and they always look texturelike. Where as if you spend the same amount of time on a procedural geometry texture you get better results and one thing that is irreplaceable and golden, SCALABILITY. You can take any rendered textures and modify them very quickly into something completely new, or combine them together much easier and faster, and you also have the option of simply importing aspects of one texture into the creation process of another texture. Thats just super sweet. When you take into account the amount of lighting and effect options in MAX or Lightwave no paint program (layers or no) can compare with the potential abilities to create really great unique images. And its a lot easier to create a texture that will tile in a full 3-d rendering environment than in something like Photoshop.

Mind you programs like Darktree and Photoshop have a place in creating new and specific kinds of procedural maps and they are great at that. So if you use the paint programs mainly as support for the rendering of textures you end up with a HUGE collection of things that are fast and easy to execute that can create essentially anything and everything you could ever want. AHA and the best part is you save the textures as 3-d files not images so they take up less space and your library of textures ends up being a huge library of MODELS and TEXTURES combined in one file. Lets say you need a skull to make a door knocker and you know a Max file wall tile you created has the skull, a bridge model has the right looking wood you want and a model of some odd little thing has hinges that can be scaled up to the size of door hinges. Basically what you have to do then is make a rectangle and import all these other models you need delete the meshes you don’t need and keep the textures. Then what’s left? Making a ring knocker for the skull. Where as the old fashioned way you would have had to have drawn a skull knocker and then a wood texture (or used an old one which may have needed to be recolored which is not easy in most paint programs) the put them together in a way that would tile correctly by cut and paste methods and that instantly degrades an image.

I say death to videodrome and hand painting scenery textures. I am very excited by all the textures in OMF:BG because they are very vibrant and clean and awesome resolution with very little graininess at all. Now what I mean by very little graininess is about twice the resolution quality of Q3 and Unreal tournament right now.

Well the Iceberg is coming along nicely. The new website is on its way. The big push for a publisher is underway full steam, and we are all gaining ground by leaps and bounds.

~K~