Michael Betke
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Posts posted by Michael Betke
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Its interesting to follow the bots conversations.
I feel a bit like Siri on my iphone. THe answers are based on keywords but dont make sense. lol
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Model the beams. It will look much better. If you consider a LOD stae too then you can use a texture there.
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What you can do to make really awesome terrains (like Andy's) is to rought out your terrain in leadwerks and export the heightmap to world machine or geocontrol for further editing.
The new heightmap can be used in leadwerks then with all it's erosion and other goodies. Doing it this way doesn't mess up your level design.
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What software do you use? I mean Blender is free and people do amazing things with it.
Sculptris is also free for sculpting and I think even Blender got nice sculpting.
For 2D I don't know. Maybe Gimp. You can lots of cool stuff without expensive tools. I would use other tools as 3dsmax too but its industry standard and lots of clients use it too. Like CAD drawings and so on.
Your models look like a good start. Just work on the textures/materials a bit more.
And the wall could use a bit more structure. Like dark areas where one stone meets the other. Why not doing 3 stone tapyes and stick them to a wall? -
The problem with texture packs are they have really to be custom made from scratch. Most photo sites like Cg-Textures have strickt EULA rules that no textures may be sold alone even if its heavily modified. Distribution is only allowed with a model which has the texture attached.
Of course if someone buys a model-set now and re-uses the textures for own creations in a CSG Editor then its okay. But selling textures alone is not allowed mostly.
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I dont know yet about the price. Something around the other
Packs. Depends what's in after all.
For the item and other additional content I will see after I checked sales for the first one. Stuff like my archviz furniture was not a good idea for example.
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Cassius, to be honest I have no proper idea about the historic background. I searched just for medieval stuff on google, games and concept arts to get inspirations. I will stick to stone, wood and whitish plaster mostly with a slight fantasy look maybe in terms of scale and colors.
I make it to try to let it look interesting. I think it will turn out nice and useable hopefully.
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Ok I see interiours are needed. It makes sense be ause most ses are outdoor only. The modules are built that is easy to do interiours. But I hesitate to do also furniture to offer a good price tag.
Since I do all the stuff in a modular way I think I will also release the parts so people can built basically unlimited houses on their own.
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I'm working on a new collection with a nice medieval theme.
At the moment I have around 10 buildings with different texture sets and heights. It will be available for Leadwerks out of the box as usual.
I hope I'm not to late with such a set because lots of stuff on the market but I think the quality of most stuff lacks a bit of quality. So this set is up to par with current games.
I will do some more (enterable) buildings plus ambient models. As usual the set fits into the style of all other packs as you can see on the shot.
If you guys have demand for some certain things (no weapons or characters) its a good time to post here!
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Yes happy now. Thanks.
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I think doing regular content doesn't qualify to make a new post every week about new content. If a vendor has so much to tell then he can do newsletters, advertise on google or Facebook or whatever.
But posting on a small community so many threads about small upates in such a short time just ended up like it happened now. With a lock-out of all sellers. This is not the best strategy and hurts business.
So no one sells model from this community anymore plus the vendors will likely cease to support leadwerks as game-ready because no one will notice if vendors put extra work for the same prize to deliver a time saver to the customers.
For me it doesn't really matter if I loose a forum because my main income are projects and maybe I'm now the bad guy here because I write about my feelings about too much advertising.
If Josh decided because of his own shop then I think is a bad step. I have a good amount of assets on the store here but only very few sales on leadwerks compared to other sites i sell too.
So long words short: all I want to tell is vendors should not post any tiny new bit in a new thread and maybe wait to make a bigger announcement.
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I supply a lot to Leadwerks user too (since 2009 now) and don't post every week a thread about any model I upload. If you look over the two last pages on offtopic and the amount of Ateria3D postings there then its obvious that there is not much contribution to the community itself but a lot of "buy my stuff" threads.
On a side-note: There is no benefit for posting so often. People who already own the models from a shop will return from time to time and buy again. At some point the market is just full and you reached your clients. This is what my Analytics also show.
Now all vendors are not supposed to post here anymore because of a few who think there might be a benefit or get some small extra cash and keep posting (or let their bots doing it).
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Just make a sub-forum like other pages too.
For me I would like to keep supporting Leadwerks with my game-ready models but I really have to calculate if its still worth setting them up for Leadwerks if I can't get any exposure with a simple forum post to attract buyers from this specific peer group here.
I hope it will be re-thought because as it comes to me I really try to stay at a minumum annoyance-level on forums/newsletters with posting only once a month.
EDIT: Taking a look I see only Ateria3D spamming the forums here mostly....
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Photoshop CS5 here.
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haha.
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How can a client get his desired interactive walk-through plus state of the art CGI renderings and movies for his marketing without making him paying two times? As most of you know todays game-engines offer a good feature set but it's a long way to CGI quality. Especially if it comes to GI and interior design.
So I took a look and thought out a way to reduce this double costs with todays tools I have at hand.
I started with the real-time version and used MentalRay for baking lightmaps. The only way to get good (static) light distribution in real-time. Since I offer a stand-alone application I just can do some levels (to keep this gaming term) with different light conditions.
I worked out some technical key elements like not making all the models to lowpoly.
Then Octane entered the game.
I converted all my standard materials with the nice Converter in 3dsmax and after 20min of fast tweaking I got a good looking realistic scene.
Now I could tweak it further, add some more stuff and so on.
All in all I was really happy with the result and a large advantage is the good rendertime for the "hybrid" setup.
Below are a few images and a YouTube link with a movie I recorded straight from my Leadwerks Stand-Alone and the custom features I have in there.
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Yes I fixed it. In the shots AO has been disabled until I changed the shader a bit so its more subtle.
Also started on teh outside...now again a transparency problem with windows in front of other transparent objects...
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I had some time to work in the interiour some more which I think is finished now beside some plants and maybe decorations. Material need to be tweaked too. I wil ltry to bake a different lightmap for the main-walls too.
I don't want to forget about the outside area and will see what I can do there.
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As I worked a lot with Cryengine I think 9-15 layers is the best. SOme levels I took a look had 22 or so. But I think its due the bad use of textures. 9 will be enought if you have decal support coming with it.
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You can bak vertex colors to get some more shadow areas for such kind of meshes.
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Yes work on the terrain texture more if the player is supposed to walk on it.
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Yes something about this value you ran into is the limit per object. I have problems with it too sometimes. Especially for arch-viz things. You need to split in more objects (some engines do it in the export).
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I really like it. Getting a slider whore in the properties roll-out but better to have some more sliders to play with as less.
What are the minimum specs a system need to display this shader? Thinking of doing a beach scene with my house I work on. But I'm afraid people with older systems dont see the ocean.
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Benton:
I hired one of the nice coders here from teh forums (Aily) and we worked out a "reflection-node" solution with a complete custom material system. Basically I can place a little sphere, press a key and it renders me a cubemap at this position which get saved. I then can edit it or just use it for a certain place. This way I could place one over the table and use the cubemap for this area only.
Reflections are important in arch-viz but also costy for the system. So this solution is a good way. Of course the material system allows me to blur the map, change strenght of the relfection and much more.
Athos:
I render it with Mentalray. But every other renderer supporting texture baking will do too. Flatiron plugin is used for laying out the sheets.
At the moment I have five lightmaps or so. Maybe I will batch them together later. Problem is that I need a new material for every object sharing same textures but different lightmaps. Its a bit tedious to set up. I could do it the lazy way and put all objects on one large lightmap but the resolution would suffer...so a bit learning how to do it best with the available tools.
EDIT: Also a small problem, normalmaps dont appear nice on a lightmapped room. Thinking about this too. Maybe a very slight point light or so without shadows.
And the wall could use a bit more structure. Like dark areas where one stone meets the other. Why not doing 3 stone tapyes and stick them to a wall?
Medieval Model Collection in the wo..done.
in Showcase
Posted
Almost finished!
At the moment I did all 15 buildings. Five of them are enterable. I already did the last material setups for Leadwerks.
As a nice goodie there are displacement maps for some of the wood and stone materials. It's made subtle but could be anhanced of course by the user. I hope to be geared up with this pack for upcoming Leadwerks3 too.
Below are two shots. Maybe I will upload the usual free building this evening to the asset store here.
Floor planks
rock walls and wooden planks with displacement
Now back to some basic structures like walls, ladders, vehicle or classical other stuff like a gallow.
The modular way is a bit of a dead-end because some elements like roofs are unique things and not modular. I think I will still include the modules but maybe there will be the need of a modeling app to make custom roofs and the underlaying wooden construction.