After doing next to nothing creative at work for the last 3 months, I've been having a blast getting back into mapping.


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Lift
Aircraft Tug
Main ref and inspiration
Nothing like a little more ref to get things rolling...

Basically its my take on 2fort. Instead of 2 forts built inches from each other the bases will be an aircraft carrier (Blue) and a dock/warehouse (Red). The bases will be symmetrical and the trick is that only a few key detail props and textures will change. If this comes off as too much of a gimmick or I can't get the dock to look the way I wanted I'll cheese out and just make them two carriers and just hick up the Red base. I'm going to try my hardest to get the first option working but if I can't get it balanced then I'll have to go with plan B.

Harsh crits always welcome.

Hey Vig, awesome idea. I hope asking questions is kosher in these sketchbook threads I hope to learn from everyone as well as share my own stuff.

What are the grid marks and green boxes for in your main ref/inspiration picture?

Each box is 128px X 128px. 128 is the height of a standard story, 72 is the height of a person. You can treat 1px as one unit in Hammer, Max and PhotoShop. To get better pixel resolution in game, all textures are scaled down to .25 by default, so you get 4px for every unit.

I think the same holds true for Maya and UnrealEd but I haven't confirmed it.

Thats a very interesting idea, and fits TF2 well. The link on image3 has a problem -- there is extra stuff trailing that needs to be nipped off of the URL.

Not important but; in the first inline image, the barrel of the gun on the left isn't reading as round. The other guns look great so I imagine it'd only be an issue if that 'head on' angle is going to be a high traffic route.

A visual queue to establish the distance between the edge of the top deck and the main tower would be handy (it seems a lot flatter in image 1 than 2). The runway would be on the other side of the tower and this a storage/work yard?

Thanks for explaining the grid.

looks great Vig!. so there are multiple paths, but the main route with in the middle on the lower deck?

FYI: Unreal has person height at 96 units, effectively each Unreal Unit = 2 CM for unreal tournament series.

looks like a fun map. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]
edit: math error

Just to prove I'm not dead and still working on the map I have this >

This Tug goes between the Air Craft Carrier and the dock, blocking the players off from the open water/sky box. I didn't bother to put in rudders or propellers because you'll never see them. I used the advanced painter script to paint the rope splines on the life ring, man I love that script.



This prop goes on top of the bridge.

I also created a bunch of hoses, wires, hooks, railings, that all go in various places. I also finished the sub and started creating the materials for the Corsair. I'm not going to bother taking renders of them all when they are so minor. Since the blue base is totally blocked out I copied it over to the red side and it looks like I can transform it into a dock without effecting the CTF mechanics, woot!

Vig that tug is great! You've outdone yourself, can't wait to see it with some colors. Good to hear you're not dead, too.

Let me know if you need any testers, I suck at tf2 but I'm great at breaking things

Originally Posted by Vig

I used the advanced painter script to paint the rope splines on the life ring, man I love that script.

does this script allow you to draw splines using a wacom tablet? Eitherway, I'd like to know where I can get hold of this script? You make it look very useful

not dead = good

Keep at it man this is looking killer. I am up for testing as well.

Hey Vig, could I trouble you for a wire of that Tugboat? And whats this advanced painter script?

This map looks so cool. Can't wait to play it! If the mechanics are as good as it looks I predict this will be a widely popular map.

Thanks guys =)
I need to finish blocking out the red base and putting in place holders for future props then I we can play test the hell out of it.

Advanced Painter : http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/advanced-painter
It lets you paint splines (and objects) on any selection of geometry. I've edited the script so the spaghetti tool doesn't place knots/verts so close. But my edits make some of the other tools buggy which I haven't figured out how to fix, so you're better off using the default one until I figure it out.


I started to optimize it a bit and once I bake the Life Ring down to the low poly it will drop by 1k-ish I went nuts with the rope =P

This is AWESOME! Dude.. I love the style of this last one... just.. spot on dude!

great to see your staying consistent with the TF2 style
good job so far

greetz

hey vig i love what you are doing here.. and i have yet to succeed in gettin a model in.

my only crits would be the tugboat seems over stylized. tf2 is cartoonish, but does not really use the skewed (whimsical) geo that it seems like you are using on the boat.

other than that its all fantastic.

Vig- you using Max for these assets? I thought it was ridiculously convoluted trying to get stuff out of there and into hl2. :S
Maybe better tools have since come out?

Mojokey, I agree. I had the same reaction last night when I dropped it in, "humm too much". The ref I chose for the pilot house probably was fine before I FFD'ed it or was just a bad choice. I bounced between the 1920's rounded pilot house and the more modern angled version. http://www.vigville.com/wip/ctf_deck..._edit1asvg.png
http://www.vigville.com/wip/ctf_deck...ugboat_web.jpg
I might mock up a quick rounded version to see how it looks before I start unwrapping.

What kind of errors are you getting? The only thing I can think of its a collision mesh problem, which you could drop the "$collisionmesh" from the QC, or its a material issue.

You need some kind of material assigned to the defuse slot for it to spit out a valid SMD. When you get serious about the material showing up in game, it needs to match the name of the VMT file. The extension doesn't matter, I like to use psd's so when I archive the model it saves my psd to. So if my VMT file is TF2_TugBoat.vmt then my psd in the diffuse slot needs to be called TF2_TugBoat.psd


K-Man, yup using 3dsMax 2k8. The exporter wunderboy wrote works pretty well.
http://www.wunderboy.org/sourceapps.php#max9_smd
But there are some funky rules you have to follow for collision meshes.
- It uses smoothing groups to tell the difference between each collision pieces, took me a few hours to figure that one out.
- The collision meshes need to be closed and it likes to patch over concave surfaces, so you end up having to break up the collision mesh into easy to digest blocks. BUT you're limited to 22 separate collision shapes per model. You can either set a flag that gives you an unlimited number of boxes, or start breaking the object into separate models.
- The UV's need to be continuous pieces, otherwise it will give an error about "2D geometry being less then .05" or some silly error. I just apply a Planar UV map to the whole thing collision mesh and it spits out a valid SMD.

Feel free to post here, PM me or hit me up on MSN, with any errors or troubles you're having. I totally feel your pain, it took me a solid week of head on keyboard action to get it all working. whatever error/problem you hit I've more then likely hit it already, no need for your forehead to be all QWERTY.

haha, that's totally badass, Vig. I always try to do levels, but I can never see them through to completion. Just not a level 'designer' I guess.
Really nice work so far.

Man I love this! Looooove this! The tires around the boat fall harshly in the middle (the donut hole). I was thinking it might be cool to see it rounded off like the rest of the tire is.

Is the boat in playable space or just external decoration?

really nice work vig! im sure this will turn out to be a really cool map.

WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
RESPECT REALLY LIKE THIS, one of the few kick ass maps for tf2

i just checked out your refs and while the ref has the angled cab as its actual shape, on your model it seems more of a style distortion and not just how the tug is made, thats what confused me most. besides that i think i prefer the round cab in the photo more.

I a little tossed up, but leaning toward the rounded version They are both unwrapped and fairly close in poly count so its a matter of style. If I go with the rounded, I'll round out the decking under it and I might decrease the number of windows. I might make one Red and one Blue and park them on both sides of the map, instead of doing an elaborate hose refueling station I had planned for the opposite end...

i prefer the round, vig anytime i drag something on that studiomdl thing it seems to not be able to find the file.. i think it may not like the space in program files or something.. do you have your dir under program files?

I have my smd and QC files in;
DProgram Files\Steam\SteamApps\MyUserName\Team Fortress2\TF2\ModelsSrc\

It saves the mdl files to;
DProgram Files\Steam\SteamApps\MyUserName\Team Fortress2\TF2\Models\CTF_Decker\

The line in my .qc file reads "$modelname CTF_decker/TF2_TugBoat.mdl"
If I delete the CTF_Decker part from that line "$modelname TF2_TugBoat.mdl" Then it puts it in the models folder. If I don't have a CTF_decker folder it won't compile. If you're using the example qc file I wrote up, and your SMD's aren't in a Mojokey folder it won't compile.

Are you dropping the files on a shortcut to studiomdl or the exe itself? I think the drag/drop method only works on shortcuts.

Are you using the version of studiomdl found in the OrangeBoxSDK? I think there is another version someplace else.