Looks familiar ?

[Sirius]

Can we get the crazy roller coaster ride in the sphere, from completing the age? *pretty please*?

Hemmm... The roller coaster is Amateria (and that's definitely one of my favorite moments of Myst III too ). I've been thinking about this kind of "WHOOOAA - BADASS!" cinematic for most of my Age concepts (that's something I am missing in Uru).
Right now I'm still in Mechanical and don't want to recreate Amateria... It's waay too big.



Speaking of Mechanical... I finally exported the Age to Uru.
I ran again in a big problem with the interior of the fortress...

In realMyst, go to Mechanical, turn the fortress 90°, then come back to Sirrus' room.
Look through the window...

I looked left, but when you look straight, you only see the big gear in the water.
Got a little idea of what's wrong ?

Now let's have a look in my version of Blender. The big camera is where you should be looking from.

[EDIT - accidentally deleted picture. Whoops ! Imagine the big camera a few meters away from the window position]
Hemmm... Question: how comes we see the big gear, and not the small bridge and the link-out room, since these should be aligned with the fortress base and the north island ?

The answer is: visregions. The inside area of the fortress is nearly twice the outside, so they used a clever trick to hide the outside while you're inside, and vice-versa.
This way it seems to fit in.


I think my version of the fortress is also too small (comparing to the islands nearby). I think this might come from the map I used.
But now it is really hard to know the exact size to make sure everything fits in.
I could use visregions as well, but it wouldn't be fine in Uru... Especially if a player can see his friend floating near the fortress wall, or if the player creates markerquests...

[Karkadann]

If theirs a way to make the AV invisible while in side the fortress we can use the same idea for the Tardis

[Sirius]

Yeah, but remember it won't work for markergames. Plus you have to make sure no physical object might block the player in this new area (or you could simply use a subworld).

I've been trying in other Ages to have such "portal" like effects, but even while messing with the draw priority I didn't find anything that could look like it... yet I won't give up on it.

[Deledrius]

You'll probably find this problem a lot making a physical recreation of Myst ages, since beyond the internal consistency of any given room there was no necessity of physical continuity between any two frames, and composition and gameplay were allowed to easily take priority.

I was considering the realities of modeling some Myst locations (partially inspired by your work here) and much like Uru's Ae'gura I think scaling would need adjusting nearly everywhere to make it work as a real place.

[diafero]

I confused Amateria and Mechanical... it's really time I play this game again.

The answer is: visregions. The inside area of the fortress is nearly twice the outside, so they used a clever trick to hide the outside while you're inside, and vice-versa.
This way it seems to fit in.

[Sirius]

I confused Amateria and Mechanical... it's really time I play this game again.

You're lucky, I really wish I could forget these games to play them again unspoiled...


Ok... Putting aside the scale error... I've been slacking the last few days, so now it's time to do a bit of texturing.
It's still quite ugly (a few seams here and there...), but it's taking shape.

Let's link to the Age !

I changed the gear texture, and destroyed the big gear in the water.
Why does the avatar's shadow disappears when I right click, BTW ? I never noticed it...
Anyway... Let's climb on the link-out room:

The lighting for the fortress really sucks. These damn wavesets too (I can't get the mapping of the cubemap right...)

Above view of the south island:

The lighting is all vertex painting, it's cheap but easy to create.

Near the railing view:


Wandering near the second island:


And finally, a bit of swimming in the sea:

(actually, this was flymode. I also tweaked a bit the field of vision, this is why the perspective is a bit weird...)

It's still really rough, but it should get better after applying more textures and better lighting.
I tried creating lightmaps, but the shadows were way too sharp. I'll have to experiment with it later.

[dendwaler]

You are doing it remarkeble well for someone who is relative new in modeling
You are a fast learner Sirius!


What did you mean with your remark

(I can't get the mapping of the cubemap right...)?

If you have unwrapping problems i might be able to give some tips.

[Sirius]

Thank you DenDwaler !

But I'm not that new... I started building when I joined the GoW... End of July 2010, according to the UCP. I currently have something like 25 ideas for Ages or environments more or less related to Myst, and currently I'm building ~9 of them (the Tehranee Maze, which I'm currently building when I'm not on Mechanical, a D'ni Balcony, an Ahnonay-like Age...).
It's just that I spend a lot of time modelling meshes, and not enough on animation, texturing, lighting, etc. In fact, I build Ages, but don't start texturing them until they are over... and since I want to create very detailed Ages, they never are
Plus I often get bored of Age modelling and give up for a few weeks before working on them again.


The problem of the cubemap, is that it doesn't reflect the world right. In most Ages, you can see the world reflect in the water (as long as you aren't too close to it...)
But in my case, the cubemap is always streched in a weird way
For instance, in the picture in which my avatar is standing on the link-out room... Most of the sea is of a dark blue, the other part is bright... And if you look carefully, you can even see the water is more streched near the edges of my water mesh... (it's easier to see when you are actually in the game)

I might try again creating those damn lightmaps... I noticed Tach added a tutorial to create lightmaps in the Relativity Blender file... might help me with those sharp shadows.

[Jojon]

Did any of the inkmakers ever look into the viability of setting up a date between Wavsets and DynamicCamMaps?

[Tsar Hoikas]

We discussed this a few days ago when talking about envmaps and modernizing the pipeline. Assuming I recall correctly, a DynamicCamMap would be inappropriate for a waveset (I don't recall why though). We decided that hemisphere maps would be more appropriate for wavesets.