Hey all, a quick intro:
I’ve been mapping for about a month and a half now, my first two weeks I used to read up on many of the tutorials out there and eventualy felt ready to start working on an acctual map. So I picked my theme (Dubrovnik, Croatia), picked the game type/objectives, thought up a general layout, and began working on it.
After two weeks of hard work I was in a rut, I felt like I nothing to show for it. Up to that point I had created everything out of caulk, as was recommended to be done in quite a few of the tutorials I had read and so I figured maybe I should just start doing some texturing to try to get my mind off of brushwork for a while. Unfortunatley since my map didn’t have the same theme as any of the stock maps (desert, snowy, beach, etc), I’d need a whole new set of textures. I was lucky enough to find a decent set of mediteranean textures and began to go to work.
This is when my problems began. When I was making everything out of caulk I had no textures, and so instead of me just making a flat wall and saying to myself, ‘I’ll tile some window textures there later’, I acctualy went and would make each of the windows out of brushes. I’d made a lip, a frame, some shutters, and recess it a bit from the rest of the wall. The same thing for doors, awnings, trim pieces, etc. I put so much detail into the brushwork that I found I didn’t have enough textures, and the amount of textures I’d need would be outrageous.
For instance, instead of just one texture of a glass window with a white frame, recessed into a stone wall, and having green shutters, I’d need a seperate textures for the glass, the frame, the wall, the shutters etc. And likewise I’d need as many seperate textures for my doors, trim pieces, and so on.
I realized at this point that you really need to know what textures you have before hand so then when being making brushes, you can make them in a way to best use the textures you have. So you’d think, now realizing this, my problems would be solved. I’d just redo my structures so that most of the detail would be in the textures and not in the brushwork. Since I’m making an urban map, I decompiled some of the popular urban maps for Wolf to get an idea of how their authors built things. For example, this building from Normany Breakout:
It’s detailed, realistic, believeable, and best of all, it’s made up of only only eleven brushes and five textures…
By knowing what textures he had to work with, the author of Normandy Breakout was able to be very efficient in the construction of his structures. I unfortunatley, can’t seem to do this. No matter how hard I try I to keep things simple, they never look right to me, I always find I need to add more and more brushes to get my desired effect. And this always ends up leading me to the same problem. Say I need some simple roadside building just to take up space, something a player would never look twice at. I mean well, but eventualy hours will pass and when I’m finished I end up with some structure made up of hundreds of brushs and requiring a ton of custom textures.
As I stated earlier, I’ve been in a rut for a few weeks now because I’ve come to realize that at this rate it’s going to take me years to finish my map. Worse still is I realize the fact that no one even cares about the details of a map when playing it, the only consideration in their mind is how it plays, and yet I can’t help myself. Whenever I pull up Radiant I find myself obsessing over the details. So does anyone have any tips on how to maximize realism while keeping things simple?
:banghead:
