Overgrowth
I recently found a video of a game called Overgrowth. The game is still in the making and there are only 4 guys working on it. The game already looks very promising. That is the art as well as the programming. Every now and then, the guys at Wolfire.com post new videos of new stuff that they add to their engine. The newest one is the one below, it shows of the new animation system.
I've had a chat with one of the developers and he was a very cool guy. They often hang out @ their IRC channel to answer questions, help people out or simply chat with fans. They were so nice to let me try out the editor and so I am currently trying to find time and create some models for it. I cant wait to put my own creations in the editor, so come back some time later to see what I've come up with.
Getting started with Habitat.
OK as promised, here's a tutorial on how to get started with habitat, the world editor from 8monkeyslab. This may sound obvious, but you need the game to be installed in order to use the Modtools. So make sure you've installed it. Download the mod tools beta from the following URL: ModTools BETA. After both are installed make sure you have everything else on the following list:
- NVidia PhysX - I had already installed it on my computer, so the DoD installer actualy Uninsulated it by running the PhysX setup again. So make sure you install it back if this is the case for you. You can find the setup file for PhysX inside your 'Darkest of Days/setup' folder.
- OpenAL - You can also find this in the same folder as PhysX. But just to be sure, here's a link to it online: OpenAL
- Updated drivers for your graphics card and the newest DirectX.
Marmoset ModTools(beta)
Remember the marmoset viewer? The best way to show off your nex-gen models? Well the guy's over at 8monkeyslab released the whole mod tools package.
It includes the following:
- Habitat. This is their world editor. So now you're not limited any more to single meshes, but you can view whole environments.
- Toolbag. The model viewer you probably already know.
- Maya plug-in. Use this to export your meshes to the engine.
- Cagebreak. This is needed to expans the game file so that you can start editing it.
Look back sometime later for a tutorial on how to use. I thought it might be useful, since some folk have trouble getting it to work.
Habitat in action.
Splashdamage: High poly bridge.
High poly bridge.
This was approximately 1h40m( had some small problems rendering it).
Tutorial: faking radiosity in Unreal.
Ok this is not really a tutorial, but more a simple technique I thought was worth sharing. The new upgrades to Unreal Engine will have this built in, but you can still use it for some manual bounce lights or in some other engine/editor.
Ok, as you know, Unreal does not calculate the light bouncing, so you can't just place a light and hope it'll look good. You need to have additional lights that help faking bounced lighting. This is what happens if you lit this scene with just a single light source in Unreal Editor.
Single light in Unreal.
Splashdamage: textured windows.
Ok, I've quickly textured it, don't want to spend too much time on it(No, im not lazy!). So you may see some weird stuff.
Textured windows.
Splashdamage: the new window.
OK I've decided to make the window flat, for 2 reasons. Nr 1: the round one looked very cartoony and unrealistic(unless it's on a boat, but my scene is not a boat/ship) Nr2: The roundness(is this a word?) made unreal unhappy, and I could not fix it with at all. Ive tried changing lightmap resolution, setting it to zero, changing the subdiv options, but no luck.
Here's the high poly of the new one in 18 minutes:
New Window-High Poly
3d Studio Max 2010 is out.
Since I'm a max user that does a lot of highpoly-to-lowpoly work, 3ds max 2010 sounds very interesting. The trial is out and I'm about to try it out. I'm especially looking forward to the polyboost/polycrunch tools.
Splashdamage: the dock
This looked way better than this, but Unreal decided to crash 
, so I quickly setup everything back but didnt work out as good as my first try, need to put some more time in it, images:
