Or 1 bitmap and 2 shaders.

That actually sounds more optimal. I would need to play around with terrain texturing a little more to see what works and what doesn't.

really? no one? fine im gonna break my code and go for it, OMG THAT LOOKS SO BEAUTIFUL!!!! but yea you should make it a little more than just a frozen pond, maybe a stream or frozen river, and upgrade those classic ice details

with textures silly

Explain. The ice shader uses the same base map as the snow, it's colored by the basemap diffuse. The basemap has blending for the two snow detail maps, but the frozen ice doesn't use those and has it's own bump.

Look at the B40 shaders for snow and ice to see what I mean. Yes, I could make the ice a separate texture and unwrap, but then I'd have ugly detail map tiling. Maybe the ice plane can be render only and float just above the snow floor and I can get it to fade out into snow at the edges...

This is my first groundmap, and I'm not too good with photoshop for these things.

No offence Jesse, but it looks very bad. Even if it was blended together correctly, you need a considerable amoutn of more detail to make it believable. Another trope that you have seemed to follow is making the paths a single line from point a to b. Not only does this generally not look good, it can make the level more linear in a sense.

The best thing to do is to take your ground map, Find a good color for the dirt, a messy brush, and put it around half opacity. Make large strokes where you want the path to be, but don't make it a straight line. Make it messy and dirty and change it up a bit. Make sure the alpha of the texture reflects these changes too, as it will blend better once in the engine. Dirt around hills and stuff like that always looks good too. For reference, look at b40's many ground maps, and they will give you a good idea. If you need any help, you know where to find me.

On the topic of 1 bitmap 2 shaders, you can use 1 bitmap for the entire ground, but split areas for the ice for example onto a another shader where the detail map is snow and then ice (where blue is). As long as the snows detail map tiling amount is the same as the other shader, they will match correctly due to the same uv space.
Edited by Higuy on Jun 17, 2014 at 12:26 AM

No offense taken, believe me when I say I know it was bad. That's mostly the reason why I posted it, see if I could get some advice since this is my first real groundmap.

Well I think what Altis means is having 2 ground maps : 1 snow to path and 1 snow to ice
this way you can make everything blend correctly, fairly nicely detailled and with adapted specular.
You can even add snow to metal shader. And use more blended map to add dirt to the structures, like I did on bigass outdoor side of the bases

Edited by bourrin33 on Jun 17, 2014 at 02:08 AM

I've done this to understand me better



red: bad
yellow: is where you can put a bit of snow
blue: make believe that the Lake is this expanding and not seems both a texture of blue snow
Edited by UHWArby on Jun 17, 2014 at 10:45 AM

Best I've got so far. I'd like to add small islands of random snow in the middle to make it look more natural. I'll do it in a bit.

The right angles are a bit strange in my opinion.

Hey, hate to break the flow of the topic, but are there tutorials that explain how to do the blending for a ground map? Thanks!

I'd make the secondary maps larger. The tiling is eyeburning. Also maybe dont swirl so much around the edge. No need for detail that extreme.

Ideally Jesse, we should be making this area fit in with the style of the existing areas, we don't need to do anything that complicated with it.

add a frozen stream from the far end

awwwh yus

now looks a little better, but snow should do it more possible real and good luck with the island of random snow

and to get further in the badassness make it transparent with visible rocks/something under !

this, or maybe something rotated so it comes from downhill
Edited by rcghalohell on Jun 18, 2014 at 11:18 AM

You guys can stop with the suggestions on how to make it awesome and take a long time to do. AS I stated earlier, the goal is to have the same level of detail here as the rest of Bungie's stock BSPs.

But... but...

That's disappointing. CMT's weapons, and new units, like the Jackal, look really good. If we're going to play through all these stock maps, for the hundredth time, it's disappointing that they won't be more detailed. CMT's Truth & Reconciliation, from 2012, had a new aesthetic. The snow made it feel different. And there were definitely some new things. Like ice pools.

Does this mean we're not going to see anything else, like that? 13 years later, no change in detail? The TSC:E videos from last year, had pretty detailed BSPs. So I know CMT is capable of it. It'll be especially weird, to have all these new assets, clashing with the old BSPs.

Agreed. I for one, despite not having the same tools as CMT, do what I can to make the campaign missions look different. The next version of the map I recently released will have different detailing too.

As you said, it's weird that CMT wouldn't change the detailing considering how easy is it. If I can do something like that, then CMT can possibly make it look even better than it would in Halo 4. With that in mind, why not?

What's done well once is done forever.

The levels get a full texture, environment, scenery and soon lightmaps (more on this in coming weeks!) treatment. The T&R exterior remodel was ultimately a mistake as we have been unable to properly replicate Bungie's portals leading to some very low performance issues. B30:E and our next evolved map, being their own self contained things do and will feature much much much more detailed BSPs.

The main issue that it comes down to with stock BSPs is that we can't remodel all of them, and we don't want to have 2 jarring different levels of detail in the BSPs in the same map. Granted like it was said, we already have a discrepancy with our assets vs BSPs, but at least that is consistent and we can dress up and manipulate the levels to appear similar.

As far as level breakdown

A10: Darker metal theme
A30: Stormy overcast
A50: Snow
B30: Jungle and beach
B40: Snow
C10: Swamp (Night, Sunrise, Day)
C20: [Classified]
C40: Snow
D20 Snow
D30: [Classified]
D40: Summer/Windows XP themed and darker metal theme

The reason for B40 sill being winter is for the consistency with H3. Even though we normally don't worry about that to much and bend the cannon to our liking, it's just to iconic a location and fits in perfect with the Jungle and Swamp that come before and after. We will probably mess with doing the summer theme to winter control room like we did in SPV2, but right now the goal is to get the thing fully playable. All detailing on the SPV3 BSPs has been put on hold until we can get B30:E's BSPs complete for the July release.
Edited by Masters1337 on Jun 18, 2014 at 01:01 PM

Wait.... D30?

Wait WUT?! How did I not see that?!

Its in the UUI update. Go check

I don't see how a little extra effort on the new bsps is a bad thing. They might end up looking slightly better than the originals, but then so what? Better to raise the quality bar a little higher and see what you can pull off than to end up with a mediocre product.

If I may ask masters, what gave you guys the idea you could juggle three different projects at once effectively?

Yeah I also don't see whats the issue of touching up some stock bsps. I'd be more than happy to help after CE3.

To be fair, CMT does not have that many bsp artists at all right now. I am currently working on TSC:Evolved's interior forerunner areas, and Teh Lag is doing our exteriors. Neither of us have time to so much as look at the Spv3 bsps, so it's up to whoever is helping Masterz at a given time to pick up the slack.

yay we are leading to internal conflicts, dissolution soon !