[Leadwerks on the iPhone]

Fantastic!

[The Zone: A final HD video tour]

@RVL Thanks! I actually was going for a kind of spotlight that was moving around, as if the helicopter was scanning all over the Zone while changing altitudes.

 

@Roland I was careful to say almost no people. Also, uh, it wasn't "stalkers"! Of course not. They were... "explorers"... cough.

[iWerks]

Great post! I use a dual OSX/Windows 7 Mac Pro at work, and it's a great machine. My only advice is to toss the Mac mouse - everyone hates them!

[Pressing the Record Button]

Thanks for the link! I've been behind on my Polycount browsing, and now I feel inspired.

[Further down the rabbit::hole]

Hey, some of those files look familiar. I'm really liking the look of the new Editor!

[Not a good sign - drive IO failiure]

Hey Flexman, try checking all of your SATA cables. I had this happen a few months ago, and it turns out I had broken a tab off of the end of one of my SATA cables which was causing it to twist just slightly in the socket and causing a boot error just like yours.

[Lashkar Gah - Final]

I've been following this - fantastic work! This level of quality with such a short deadline is nothing short of impressive.

[Leadwerks Blog Post 11: Welcome to The Zone]

Thanks everyone!

 

@Roland: I was the lead artist and the level designer for this project, but all of the natural props (trees, bushes, rocks, etc) were created by Michael Betke along with a few other props like the metal shed, the wooden shipping pallet, and the yellow oil drum.

 

It's tough to come up with an exact figure for the hours invested in this project, but I do know that it was well into the hundreds of hours, and quite a few late nights!

 

I'm not sure what my next project will be or when it will be (I'm actually getting married in a couple of months, so my current project is building a very real-life house), but you may see more of my work in Leadwerks in the future.

[Another art-dev diary update]

I actually like the sky cloud-less like it is now, but you probably want the option of clouds for different situations. Crysis has some excellent examples of how a sky without clouds can still look very realistic thanks to atmospheric perspective.

[Another art-dev diary update]

The updates are looking great!

[Leadwerks Blog Post 10: A Grave Sign of the Times]

That's definitely true for well-trafficked urban areas like Moscow, but rural areas usually got statues that were much more simple. I based my hammer and sickle off of this image: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb134/EvilViking13/Leadwerks/The%20Zone/?action=view&current=hamerandsickle.jpg

 

...with some creative license too of course.

[Leadwerks Blog Post 10: A Grave Sign of the Times]

Thanks everyone! It's been a long road, but I'm very happy with how it's all coming together.

 

@Mumbles: I really do like this lighting much more than the overcast lighting. For an accurate overcast scene, I really needed to get rid of most of the main direction light in the map (which would have gotten rid of most of the shadows as well), but that would have looked rather flat and boring. I think the new light setup is much more visually interesting. I fixed the blog title too. That's what I get for relying on copy & paste!

 

@Josh: It's actually a slightly modified skybox texture from CGTextures. I just spent some time aligning the lights to an interesting angle, and setting up a good color mix between the directional and ambient lights. After that, it just needed some work with the Environment object to get some good fog that fit in and a nice balance of brightness, contrast and saturation. I have this scene at 0.8 saturation at the moment.

[The Zone video (take 1)]

Cool, do you have the link Pixel Perfect?

[The Zone Blog 08: Fire in the hole!]

@omid3098 - Good eye! I think I'll redo the base metal texture.

 

As for the motherboard brand, if you look carefully (or not so carefully) the brand name is visible in that image. It's strange, because it's a very good brand. I've been buying their graphics cards for quite a while. They do have excellent 24/7 tech support, thankfully.

[Can you tell what it is yet?]

Very cool! I've always been a big fan of the CH-47.

[Leadwerks Blog Post 06: Incoming Renders]

You pretty much nailed it Flexman. I'm using a 2 color vertex color modifier in 3ds Max with black and white. White is the stucco, and black is the brick. I actually have a dummy "checkered" texture applied to the blended parts of my model named "barracksblend" in Max, and my barracksblend.mat file (posted in the blog) then defines which textures the vertex colors apply to the model in the engine.

[Leadwerks Blog Post 06: Incoming Renders]

Thanks everyone! Making photo realistic landscapes and outdoor areas is quite easy with Michael's excellent vegetation and nature models.

 

Good point with the rusted light, I'll redo their texture soon. I'm currently using version 2.32 R4 of Leadwerks.

[Building a city, Herat]

Now there are some really nice low poly buildings. Just the right amount of detail up close, and they look fantastic from the air. I'm looking forward to seeing more!

["The Zone" Blog 04: A Bridge Too Far (Or as far as you need it, actually)]

Thanks everyone! I'm not sure if Josh is going to make this a playable level or just a visual example, but it's possible.

 

Flexman, did you make sure that HDR is on? My terrain comes out white if HDR is turned off.

[Firefox Explorer]

The web designer in me is horrified, haha.

[Avionics and cockpit update]

I've found that the newest nVidia drivers under Windows 7 are rather subtle about resetting. Previously my screen would flicker or black out for several seconds, but now it flickers and resets so quickly I sometimes don't even notice until I realize that performance has dropped.

 

What Josh says about heat is true though, it shouldn't get to a point where the card is too hot. My problem is more related to overloading my GPU I think (Running Leadwerks, 3ds Max, Crazybump and other apps that use the GPU all at once).

 

Just to make sure that heat isn't an issue, if you have an nVidia card download the EVGA Precision Tool and use it to set your fans at 80 or 90% manually when needed. Sometimes the auto-fan tries to play catch up too much.

[Avionics and cockpit update]

The slowdown could be caused by your Windows video drivers resetting. Occasionally when I'm running Leadwerks with everything on high, my video card will get very hot and it may stop responding. This causes Windows to reset the video driver, which may show as a quick screen flicker. After this reset, the a temporary driver is loaded until you restart and the real driver is loaded once again. The temporary driver will only give me single digit FPS.

[SimHQ Dev Diary update]

This is looking really great! The authenticity and attention to detail are excellent.

[Don't you just hate it when that happens ...]

Very cool!

[Welcome to the blog!]

This new pine tree set is a great compilation! All of the models compliment each other very well, and they make for very "full" looking forests. I look forward to seeing future sets for sure.