Waterdeep/Skullport Progress Screens

[Rotku]

My god indio, you're a bloody toolset monster. Meant in an entirely complimentary way, of course.

[indio]

Dock Ward


I've broken the back of the building as of today with the second last of the major exteriors. I've got 6 areas which are primarily rural/sea/mountain and so won't take long.

All building will be complete by the end of the weekend in time for the 3 get-together's planned xmas eve, day and boxing day.

After that and until New Years Eve, texturing and decoration (trees and whatnot), although the decorative part I will largely leave to cipher and his team. I'll also probably not do City of the Dead.

Now the big issue is height variation. I'm exploring a few ways to introduce it without screwing my walkmeshes, and one way is looking promising.

[HEEGZ]

Now the big issue is height variation. I'm exploring a few ways to introduce it without screwing my walkmeshes, and one way is looking promising.

I imagine that the city blocks don't need to have their heights varied except to lower the larger roads a little bit to show wear. The rest can be done mostly with textures I'd think. So you'd have the city blocks same level, then walls, and all of the heights would vary by the mtns and outside the city. Naturally the docks area would drop off, but I don't really think it would be highly necessary to alter the elevation gradually. The way the wards are split up you can pretty much assume that the height varies in between the ATs. Well, at least that is the way I'd do it. The variations in height of all of the various buildings used work pretty well to break up the flat terrain anyways, and I'd rather see more time spent decorating, etc. than replacing doors and other problems I've seen with changing elevations under buildings. Of course if you have an easy way that works go for it, but it looks really impressive as is IMHO.

[edit] Actually I guess an easy way might be to flatten large swathes similar to a rice paddy. Basically specific neighborhoods could be elevated en masse and you'd just have to alter the road in between them. As if the higher areas are on a ridgeline or something, and gradually tier upwards as you near the mtn. I still think it'd be easier to just leave the major urban areas flat and use elevation around the outsides though.

Nate

[indio]

That's just what I wanted to hear. Thanks.

[Wynna]

A little PR work done on the private PW Roundtable, NWN2 PW Builders Forum and submitted to the Vault, pending approval.

Thank you, Indio.

[HEEGZ]

Indio I sent a PM to cipher to add you to our usergroup so that you can see alot of the work that was already done. Plus it might save you some time. So if any admin wants to add indio to the NWN2 - 01 usergroup it'd help speed things along I think. Thanks

Nate

[edit] This one:

http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpbbforum/ ... f29b1989b4

[indio]

That looks great Wynna.

[Rusty]

Added indio.

[HEEGZ]

Added indio.

thanks

[ç i p h é r]

Truly magnificent. The rate at which you're chewing through areas is hardly believable, Indio! We may even see Mulu develop a monotheistic belief system at this pace!

Regarding height, logical and gradual terrain variation from sea shore to mountain side would certainly be nice to see, but if that compromises what you are doing, it just isn't worth having.

Keep up the terrific work.

[indio]

Thanks for the feedback cipher.

I'm uncertain about height variations still, having played about yesterday with them for a few hours. And texturing is the same...still a lot of uncertainty.

I tried to incorproate the types of cobble/paving/gravel for differing road types, but I quickly run out of textures for other important things when doing that.

I'm currently being happily distracted by the Witcher and will be for a few days, but I think new year is looking like a reasonable deadline. If anything changes this may be delayed a bit, but I myself don't want to have the job lingering.

[Grand Fromage]

I was originally going to build my big city on a slope, but uh. Yeah. It's a huge pain in the ass, you might want to just skip it. Unless you really enjoy carefully adjusting the height of every single building, anyway.

[indio]

Yeah.

The only possibility is a carefully photoshopped heightmap. I've got screenshots of each area with exact building locations, allowing me to (theoretically) design a custom heightmap that uses a number of gradients for variety, but loses the gradient when it comes to a building. It sounds pretty ordinary in theory and is likely to be worse still in practice.

[Thangorn]

Theoretically that sounds great indio. I think that'd be pretty tortorous for me to make and test a bunch of heightmaps until they are right but in some situations that'd probably be the way to go.

Since you wont need masses of elevation changes for a city like Waterdeep maybe it'd be easier to heightlock everything, give it a big once over with the flatten tool for the elevated/lowered sections you require and then just make manual smoothing, lowering and noise adjustments.

if you use big flattened sections you can just grab a whole block of buildings at a time, lose the heightlock and adjust them to all the same height.

At least you can do it all in realtime without having to back and forth between heightmaps. I guess its not a huge problem though as you can make and test heightmaps in realtime with both Photoshop and the Toolset running..

anyway just thinking out loud..

I wish I'd known this method for Zhentil Keep, it would have made the whole elevation fiasco so much easier..

[HEEGZ]

Well lots of the neighborhoods in WD are on a plateau... Just creating the mtn, cliffs and seeing to the walls is probably enough variation to satisfy immersion. I completely agree with GFs post cause it's a huge PITA to rearrange the buildings/doors.