Hello, Dano here again, as some of you know, I'm texture artist for CMT.

Well, heres my first ever map in progress. These are just renders. No after effects. Just my materials and the lighting.




^ And a sexy shadowed render.


All the textures, I've painted and designed myself in photoshop. No bungie textures are going to be used at all, to show off my texture painting abilities. The normal mapping on the cliffs is going to be baked in the CE version, while the h2v version it will be real time normal maps.

Oh, and the blue base hasn't been textured yet. Still uv mapping.

Also, the shadowing seen in the last render, Is going to be of that exact quality. Move over standard lightmapping, and welcome in Jahrain's new Mental Ray lighting procedurals technique. Thank you Alias Maya ^_^.


Amazing quality lightmaps in about....30 minutes?



The map is quite large, the structures are massive and tower above the players. I'm going for a gulch style map, but with alot more structural and defensive involvement. Inspired by high grounds dirty look, and inspired by Epitaphs holopanels and "epic" feel.

But for the most part, it's inspired by the death my sister this year. All the forerunner pattern textures are themed around her, and show a symbolic representation of her passing.

This map is also for Halo 2 Vista, but It's going to be for CE first.

It's about 50 percent of where I want to take it.



Also, I owe a large portion of my learning to the community at h2vista.net. Without those bunch of talented artists and programmers, I wouldn't have got the proper criticism I needed to make the map glorious.

Still not done yet though, not for a long time :P
Edited by D4NO on Aug 6, 2007 at 06:52 PM

CMT is very lucky to have you.

the map looks nice.

Woah, you can use Mental Ray in CE??!! How!!!???

Sexy cliff texture.
Can't wait for this.

http://www.h2vista.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2920

read that topic. Jahrain figured a way to make lightmaps for Halo CE, it's extremely hard to do, but if you can do it, you can create near perfect lightmaps using Mental Ray.

You need to have pretty decent photoshop skills too.

Good job, I'm surprised to find you somewhere other then H2V, D4no. Sorry to hear about your sister, I'm sure that was very hard for you to go through. I had to do the same thing when my dad died.
Looks very nice, better then any map I can think of. It even looks nicer then Yoyorast V2.
Can't wait for this to be out!

Ah, ok. I'll check it out.

awesome map design Dano. u r really good a photoshop to make all those textures. I cant wait to see wat it looks like in game, and im really srry about ur sister....i almost had to go through that again with a close friend, but becasue of me he didnt, and the first time was a family member but not a sister......

Good Job overall 10/10 and +rep lol

I did just notice 1 little thing:
At the top of the cliffs, there needs to be a little work done. It doesn't blend in with the bitmaps behind it. Also, on top of the cliffs, there needs to be rock formations similar to the ones on the cliffs.
Also, on the second pic, the bitmaps near the bottom of the cliff seem a little stretched. That needs to be broken up, maybe with more rock formations or something to that effect.

No, I painted the seamless texture and normal map in photoshop.




Edited by D4NO on Aug 7, 2007 at 02:42 AM



Also, making lots of holopanels now



Edited by D4NO on Aug 7, 2007 at 03:14 AM

The image is a broken link.

thats absolutely beautiful. its your avatar in h2v forums isnt it? id love to play this map

looks pretty sick....good luck with that

o_O

I was?

Whats that anyway?

i like the looks of this map, sorry about your sister

This looks awesome, can't wait for it, I almost mistook it for a H2V ONLY map because the textures are so great!

tell me, what is the function of the (awesome) structure in the middle... it spins doesnt it? it looks like a forerunner plant of some kind

The structure will be one of the main vantage points of the map, hosting a spartan laser right in the middle. The map is going to have a classic weapon set, but just a few changes, like an SL instead of Rocket, the NEW Halo 3 AR that just got finished for our single player mod and the spiker. Everything else is still there, maybe a slight skin tweek I'm not sure.

The middle structure doesn't spin, but It's glows with a beautiful slowly flashing light. BAsically, when I make it, There will be a Grav lift/man cannon in the h2v version that shoots you upwards to it, and in CE, I'm going to make a slight modification, and make a large fallen tree that gives you access to the top, and the tree will be standing right next to a broken grav lift, just for aesthetics.


Also, theres going to be something unique about the lighting of the map.

I plan on making an animated scenery work as a virtual eclipse.

What will happen is, a large textured sphere that looks like a wierd moon, will rotate around the map as though it's in orbit, quite slowly, maybe crossing the sun once every 5 minutes. Basically, it swings around, covers the sun and creates an awesome effect. In h2v, I'll be able to take direct advantage of the dynamic lighting and bloom, to make it REALLY look awesome, but For CE, it will still look really cool.

So you say it won't be done for a long time :P
How long is this...'long time' going to be?

ah... i was under the impression that it spun because of your h2v avatar.

and will this map have n updated halo 3ish ma5c?

Man... That looks awsome. The texture makes the cliffs look like it has a couple billion pollies in it.

But about the perfect shadow thing... Are you going to make the shadows perfectly sharp? A real shadow is the closer the object is to the shadow, the more sharper, and the farther, the more blurry.

Edited by The Spartan on Aug 11, 2007 at 09:20 AM

Are you going to even redo the sky??? Most of the people just modify a default Halo sky, no one has actually made a new Halo sky.

There are lots of maps that have custom skys, you just have to play on them lol... I beleive Mystic is one (i wouldnt know, the sky doesn't really show for me) I know Prime C3 (And T3) has one...

Yeah, yeah yeah, I know that, I made plenty myself, but I meant a Halo Ring thing, I mean no one has really re-textured it.

look for burn side..... worst sky reskin ever... but hey it's reskined.