http://i.imgur.com/SGCEhu8.png 

oddly, shot 1 was started and completed in an afternoon. I wish all areas went by so effortlessly :(

all shots are very WIP, btw. 

 

I like them. 

Is pretty sweet also.

In the second shot the stripes of light are coming from the left? (outside of the shot)

The third one also has an interesting indirectly lit look. 

In the second shot, the stripes of light are coming from the top.

When I first started this map I knew nothing, not even that light had properties that could be manipulated (falloff, angle, etc) so I thought of this little gimmick to kinda get light the way I wanted it.

In shot two, you see a little bit of a white light texture in at the top, it's illusionary. Behind it is a shaft with a bright light at the end. This allows you to focus bright light into any shape you want, in this case, a rectangle. By moving the light closer or father away you can change the sharpness of the projected light.

It's a cool effect. You can have very controlled bright light in otherwise dark areas. The contrast becomes even cooler when enemies move between the shafts of styled light.

Now that I know how to change light parameters It's not my go-to way of lighting, however, I still use it for it unique effect in certain areas.

Here are some very early shots, the top right was the first use of the shaft light method.

http://www.killpixel.com/kpcn/KPCN_old.jpg 

I remember playing an old version of this... it was pretty unique. :) 

Good info :) 

Last shot reminds me of some architecture I used in the Monolith map in E.Y.E. Good stuff. 

The Rune of Black Magic is whispering dark secrets into my brain, Scoob!

http://secretfunspot.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/50-scooby-doo-background-paintings.html?m=1 

bottom right shot looks so cool. Way to go. 

love those scooby-doo backgrounds.

I love how they light the nighttime scenes with shades of blue. I wonder if this was an influence on lucasarts adventures (esp. monkey island) which has a similar style 

http://i.imgur.com/UdTTMt1l.png 

nice lightning block in the middle. 

A few days ago Lunaran posted a pic of a really nice looking Quake4 map. Upon looking through the rest of the screenshots, this caught my eye.

It was sexy and I knew I'd seen it before, like here in Doom3 or here in Quake2.

These areas use tall, pillar type brushes that look structural. In between them you can place walls, eye candy, or whatever. It makes mapping flexible and it looks cool. Ordinary walls now have a bit of interest and the utilitarian look if the beams/pillars adds believability.

So, since I'm over a decade behind on mapping theory, I gave this idea a shot. This also gave me an excuse to give making textures a second try.

BAM.

It's generic as hell, but still cool. This is part of the big map I'm working on. The new textures will seem jarring, as there aren't any others elsewhere, but, meh.

Download the map and take a look for yourself, or Download the textures if you'd like to use 'em. 

nice textures! 

I think we found our next speedmap session. 

are those your textures?

If so, some advice:

1. edges of features should line up with pixel boundaries in a consistent way. For example, your floor texture has 4-pixel wide openings, but the space between openings seems to be 4.25 pixels, so the third slot is obviously .5 pixels off, and then by the 5th slot you are back on grid. This creates a lot of unnecessary and inconsistent antialiasing.

The wall vent in the top right screen shot, far right edge is an example of repeated features completely not lining up with the grid, so they are all blurry and weird looking

2. repeated patterns like vents and ribs also should be powers of 2 in size. This way even when mipmapped down they retain their crisp readability. Your floor vents are good because they are 4 pixels wide with 4 pixel gaps (once you fix that gap width) so even on the third mipmap they will be crisp. So try to make things 1px, 2px, or 4px in size, and gaps between features should be 1,2, or 4px wide.

3. All of the textures in your screenshot have almost the same color across the entire texture. It's a very flat, brown look. Adding some sort of contrasting material color can really help make your textures pop. It doesn't have to literally be a "Color", it can be more brown but of a different value (for example you have one panel that is slightly darker brown, try making it even darker so it stands out against the lighter brown you are using everywhere else. It can also be the same color but a different saturation, for example taking that brown and fading it almost to a dirty grey color. And of course you can add more of a real color too. The red pipes in some quake2 maps is a good example of color that pops well.

4. finally, a good way to maintain color harmony with different textures -- once you have more than one color :) -- is to make sure that in any given texture, some pixels share the primary color of other textures. The quake palette helps with this of course. if you look at the quake metal textures, the grey textures have blue pixels and the blue textures have grey pixels, so the eye sees those repeated colors and it pulls the whole scene together better. Textures that don't look good together often have no common colored pixels. 

@necros - Thanks!

@FifthElephant - IF you do, you might wanna download my first attempt at textures and mix them in for some much needed contrast.

@metlslime - Thanks for good advice. I fixed a few other textures that suffered from the misalignment issues you mentioned, but then just got lazy... I should fix these. What they would look liked mipped never even crossed my mind, nice pointer.

And yes, they're all exactly the same color. I should do something about that. hehe... looks like Alien3.

And your final point is very nice, I'll put all your advice to use my next texture making go around (third times the charm, hopefully).

Tell me what you think of this idea, and if it's not a very good one on a technical level:

I planned on greyboxing an entire map, focusing purely on gameplay. Then making a single, giant texture for each wall, all uniquely drawn. It's basically like megatexturing quake style. I think this could yield some really cool results, however, my technical ignorance causes me to wonder how bsp/engines would deal with that.

Just imagine: a map without any tiling textures, just a big, uniquely drawn canvas full of detail... 

It's worth trying but you should do an early stress test to see if it's even viable -- there are a number of steps in the texture loading pipeline that probably never had to handle 100s of megs of texture data. You'll probably need a giant -heapsize, for example.

Also, map load times will go up linearly with the amount of texture data to load. I like how quake takes 2-3 seconds to load a map. Changing that to 30-60 seconds doesn't sound like fun to me as a player. 

"Tiling textures are really just a crappy form of compression." -John Carmack

"No, they're a great form of compression." -Lunaran 

Carmack 1, Lunaran 0.

yes killpixel studying the level details of lunaran and others like him that are good at architecture is the best way to improve your mapping skills. 

Speedmapping could be a great idea with this set :) Totally Doom-base style (which I love).

<3 

Crappy form of compression, great form of workflow. 

Glad ya dig it :D I rather like the doom base look myself.