some lights

Just a quick post today just showing  some small ground lights for the plaza based on some I saw on my trips to London around the southbank area. They look really great at night and looked very atmospheric. Though seeing as I found the glow material it would be a shame not to use them as it gave me such a good effect on the lift! Oh and I forgot to mention I had been playing with the lighting and time of day again to achieve the nice bloom effect which is noticeable with the night time of day I have set in the screen shot.

Need a lift???

I've been working on some lift doors that will just be static, so I tried to make them more interesting by having the animated texture sign and also applying a glow effect to certain areas to give the effect their is power running through it and adds a bit of life to the scene. The glow effect was created by using the alpha channel to mask the areas i wanted to glow and that applying that mask to the glow material slot in the material editor, I foiund quite quickly that using it careful and not poushing too much was important or the diffuse texture gets washed out completely and teh bloom from the lughts becomes a little too intense.

Material editor

The material editor in cryengine is brilliant and easy enough to use with a little reading up on the crydev.net forums and cryengine documentation. I wanted to create some dynamic textures in my scene e.g. moving images and illuminated signs, glow for lights etc.

After reading a few things I started work on a test piece for moving textures. I posted the image with the material browser window next to it to show the tiling settings and how it moves. I found that it comes down to the way the textures are laid out so I figured that the use of multi/ sub would be necessary for these types of signs and would need their own texture space I f I wanted them to move without showing other pieces of the static uv sheet!!!!

working on textures

I started to play around with the material editor and the textures as I wasn't to happy with the look I have at present so I decided to change it up a little and think it looks better for it though I'm still battling with the walls of the plaza as I think having the shops and other assets over them will help to define what is needed of them to make them feel more realistic. I also want to try and avoid having my level looking to white as it seems to be slighty too monochrome (even though the area is obviously meant to be relatively clean and shiny, much like zaha hadids architectural works) but I think I'll wait to let the environment progress and see how everything sits before making any rash decisions.

Pulling it together

The pipleine has been really great to work with as it allows me to seamlessly flow between max and the editor. I'm starting to put all the main structures in now all the uv's have been properly sorted so they tile efficiently and the materials have also been set up and exported to which now means I can start filling the main area up!!!

Lighting with assets

Heres the skscraper with a place holder texture as the replace me textures were getting rather annoying!!!!! But the main reason for this post is to show of the lighting i'm happy with!!! I want to ad in some clouds and other things to fill the sky up a bit and make it feel more real but that can come later. With the time of day setting I also managed to get the top of the skyscraper to start blurring out as well from the player perspective to add that sense of scale.

Solutions and a bit of lighting

I've spent the last few days or so working on figuring the lighting out and playing around with the settings and graphs. I've really enjoyed some of the flexibility with the options it gives and makes the engine very versatile to use, in terms of getting the look you want from it! Here's a screen shot of me working on the lighting and the Time of Day settings. I've actually managed to achieve a much better lighting I had after reading more into the documentation.