Llantern

[andylegate]

Okay, I'm not too sure why you are beating yourself up here, except that, as the artist and creator, you will tend to be more critical of yourself than outside observers.

However, while you are striving for perfection, I will tell you that you are doing great for someone who has only really started to get into this! So stop beating yourself up so much. You are making excellent progress!



Now, since you asked, I'll point out a few things, with GUESSES as to what is wrong. However, you are in no way obligated to listen to anything I say, heh.

Let's talk about your shore foam. Hey the water looks great! And I bet once you fix the shore foam things will look even better!
Okay, taking a look at this picture here:



First gut reaction is: your mesh for your shore foam is moved away from the actual shore. At least that's what it looks like here. The problem is: I have no idea what the width of your shore foam mesh is. I could import your Age into Blender and look, and I most likely will.

Let's forget about the fact it's not up against the shore right now, and instead look at what it's doing. It's the wrong color. Rather dark. No problem there, you need to make your material on it Emissive. That way it's nice an bright. That will take care of that.
The other thing I'm seeing is that you need a fall off gradient texture applied to it, so that you don't have that straight line where the foam suddenly ends. You need a gradient texture that starts off white and fades to black. Now Max has these, but Cyan's Plugin get's upset if you use them when you go to export (not sure why). But you can make this type of texture that I'm talking about and use it as your Top Layer with alpha Blending. Just make sure you UV Map it the same as your foam texture. White is where the foam will show, Black will turn it transparent.

Okay, moving on.

Let's look here:



Just a suggestion but, if you can, it would be better to have the sand rise up gently to the cliff face (that's what it does in RL), and blend into the cliff face. Again, just a suggestion.

Look at your rocks:



Good textures (I recognize many from Genetica, heh), but you need to take some time UV mapping them a bit better. Can get tedious, I know, but spending the time on it will give you outstanding results.

Edit: Also, you might try adding the "Smooth" component to this rock. It's under New > Render > Smooth. You'd be surprised at how well it smooths meshes out!

Okay, let's talk about your shadows:



You have to make choices here: lightmaps make help make great shadows, but will bloat your texture prp file like you would not believe. Vertex Painting will help so that your texture prp is not so bloated, but when it comes to shadows that you get up close to, like in the pic above, you can see the pixelation of the shadow.

Some cures for this would be:

For shadows that are far and the player can't get close to, depend on the Vertex Painting. The pixilation will not be so apparent.
For shadows that are close, you can try subdividing the faces (so you are adding more and more verticies) in the area that you the shadow will fall on. More verticies means the smoother your shadows will look.
However, be warned: don't go crazy on the sub-dividing! Keep it only to the faces where the shadow will be. Try to find where enough is enough, and not too much. Else you'll get a performance hit in game.

Ah! One last suggestion: Your cliffs look great! (I also recognize that texture, heh), however when you get close they are blurred. This is normal, but you can fix that by using the Detail function in the Materials Editor. Use a 2nd texture for the top layer (that has alpha), that is UV mapped so that it looks great up close, and then use the "Use Detail" part of the layer to set up so that it's rendered when the player is close to the cliff face, but invisible when further away. Cyan used this a lot with places like this (Er'canna cliffs and ground. The Cleft's ground, etc).

Over all, like I said, quit beating yourself up! You are making excellent progress! You are already doing much better than I was when I first made Zephyr Cove (and I had been at this for 6 months before I made Zephyr!).

Speaking of which......when I linked in and wandered around, I got a really strong sense of Deja Vue! hehehehehehehehe



Oooooo. this looks promising!

[N. Sigismund]

Cheers for the feedback Andy!

[andylegate]

Okay, I imported your Age into Blender an began to poke around in it.

One problem I noted was it's showing that the pivot point for your Waveset is with the mesh, and not above the mesh where the surface would be. BUT, I suspect that you did do this right, but importing it may have moved the pivot point.



Now, looking at your Shore foam, Yee-Gods! Yes, okay I see 2 problems.

Problem number one: you don't have a texture assigned to it! You need a foam texture assigned to it, as Plasma is going to animate that texture. Here, you can use the one I used in Zephyr Cove for now, but I'd recommend you make your own when you can (mine is not actually "mine" but I think came from Cyan, but hey, if it works....):



Now that you have a texture assigned to it, You can UV map it correctly, but that brings up your next problem.

Your Shore Foam is HUGE! It's like over 20 feet wide!



I think mine in Zephyr is like 5 or 6 feet. So you need to kind of squeeze down some. Try that, and the UV map it to the texture.

Then export, link in and see what you get!

[tachzusamm]

Your Age looks really promising, Nye!
And Andy is absolutely right; don't worry about your "slow" progress - in fact, you're really fast. (Especially compared to me, hehe.)

It's not been converted to POTS format. Paradox was testing something which needed a MOULa age. You'll need to convert it to POTS format - you can do that using Drizzle.

Umm, yeah. How?
I managed to convert the .age and .prp parts, but what about the .sum and .fni things?
(I'm quite sure there must have been a thread describing how to convert from MOUL files to POTS ones with drizzle - but it seems I cannot find it again.)

Cheers, Tach

[andylegate]

Drizzle will automatically generate those files for you. You also would not be familiar with this conversion process unless you're using Max to make Ages with.

Places Nye's age files in a folder called C:\PlasmaTest\dat
In Drizzle, go to the tab labled "The Art"
There will be a big box in the middle. Click on the "Select" button and select the C:\PlasmaTest folder (no, not the "dat" one)
Then in the box below it called "Ages" type in the name of Nye's Age, llantern and click on the button called "Convert"

You'll see messages scroll up in the log box. Once it says it's done (takes only a few seconds), you can go to your Uru and load it up. Once in Relto use the OfflineKI command to get to Nye's Age by either using the /link llantern command, or link to the Nexus and use it's panel to get there.

[tachzusamm]

Thank you Andy, this worked.
(In the first place, I converted them via Advanced -> Manual Conversion -> Moul, then setting up the folders and processing a single file. Gave the same PRPs - I did a binary compare with those converted following your suggestion afterwards - but not the sum and fni.)

Now going to have a visit.

EDIT: Ok, I had a visit. Great.
Nye, I must tell you that you have a good feeling for lighting. Some Ages I've seen look a bit dark, some look a bit (or much too) bright, but yours just looks real and simply "right". Maybe the avatar itself could be a bit more lit, but the world itself is 100% how it should look, would look if it was a photo of a beach.
Keep up the good work.

[Tsahl]

I don't have anything to contribute in terms of technical problems, but I can honestly say that this age is looking fantastic, and I see amazing potential. The lighting is beautiful, the texturing for the most part looks excellent, and the trees are so real, I could swear your cut and pasted them from a photograph. Keep up the excellent work, Nye!

[N. Sigismund]

The scary thing about the lighting is how easy it was. All it takes is one Max light set to ambient mode. In the real world, most outdoor scenes never have really dark areas and generally quite level lighting over all. An ambient light basically makes everything it's allowed to interact with be lit to a certain level by default. It's very nice.

I personally think lighting should be something you consider often when developing the age. So I'll generate lightmaps on every export, I'll mess around with both runtime and max lighting , different colours... Models are important, textures are important, but lighting can add real drama.

I've taken a lot of suggestions on board, most notably to scrap the lightmaps on both the seashore and the cliffs. They will be replaced with good "rubbed in" vertex colours. A lot of the models are going to be remade, too.

I'm currently worried about one thing, and that is how to treat the sea. If I do it like Nobolen and have invisible walls so you can't go swimming, that's going to feel very rough. But I can't see a way to allow a swimming trip...

Oh, if anyone has advice on how to add a little bit of fog to the area near the horizon, I'd appreciate it.

[Paradox]

For fog, you want to create a .fni file. There should be information on the GoW wiki about it.

For swimming... what you might be able to do is add a current after a certain point, so that (just like Ahnonay) the avatar will only be able to swim so far before being pushed back by the current.

[andylegate]

For the fog, depends on what you want exactly.

If you mean like a distant haze on the horizon, you can do that by putting in some planes that face the shore line, and then texture them with a fog or mist (Myst?) like texture that has alpha in them. You could even animate the texture, so it looks like the fog is moving slowly.

If you're talking about more of a fog or mist throughout the Age, then you control that with your .fni file. The GoW Wiki talks about that file. Max doesn't produce it when it exports, and Drizzle gives you like a "default" one. What you can do is edit the one Drizzle makes for you, and see how you like it's settings.

As far as blocking people from the water, :shrug:, there are places in Uru where we have that: The hoods, Kemo are 2 good places where the player is blocked by invisible colliders. Some won't mind, others won't like it. Can't please everyone.

You CAN make a swim area if you want, just put in a strong current so that the player can swim out to a point, but then won't get any further and slowly get's pushed back to shore (think Ahonanay, Sphere 1). I did that in Zephyr when I first made it.

Oops! Looks like Paradox posted while I was making this.