Outdoor thingy
Community Forums/Showcase/Outdoor thingy
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| Hi, I had this lying around doing nothing on my harddrive, so I figured I might as well post it here :) Updated! Much improved grass, and the sky isn't cubemapped anymore. The river is still cubemapped, so people with lower end graphics cards, may miss a few reflections on that. - Download here (11Mb) - - More images here -  The lighting was done in gile[s], the trees with tree[d], and the sky with clou[d] :) The grass uses a z-ordering thingy originally made by beaker, but tweaked a lot. You can find it here: http://www.blitzbasic.com/codearcs/codearcs.php?code=850 And it's obviously all done in Blitz3D...And another obvious thing (perhaps) is that I am a great fan of Outcast, and feel it is a crying shame Outcast2 was canned... |
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| Ok, I'll kick in the obvious open door: ....what is clou[d]?... Looks nice except for the grass. What did you use to model the landscape? And I like the "staring in the sun" effect, how is did you do that? |
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| clou[d] is fredborgs tool for making skyboxes/domes etc. It hasn't been released AFAIK, which is a shame cos its very good. |
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| pretty |
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| Fredbourg, Just lovely dude! Thanks for sharing, I love to see stuff like this! It just shows what you can do with some effort and some talent! Nice one! IPete2. |
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| Beautiful. You have truly mastered Global Illumination. |
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| nice work..textures and lighting looked great |
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| It looks great. Only thing I don't like is the textures of the trees and other foliage, but that's a problem I have with a lot of projects here. I think the edges are often a bit too hard. It could use some smoothness. If you use pngs, that could be easily resolved (for instance, by selecting the inverse of the texture with a small feather setting, and deleting it, and also setting the alpha of the layer to 50-80%). But that's probably just me. Appart from that, it looks fantastic. |
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| Yeah - the trees look a bit scratchy - but I love it! |
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| Additional generic user comment, fredborg! But am I the only one who isn't seeing the sky but rather the cascading effect you get when you stare into the void? I just find this peculiar. |
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| the top and bottom ones look like something outta Halo. The middle one, probably more FarCry. Really impressive. Nice stuff! |
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| Other than the obvious collision problems this is one of the best works I have seen coming out of Blitz 3D. Yes, the grass could be better, but other than that, amazing stuff. One thing you may want to do is limit the player from climbing sheer rock walls, as the illusion is destroyed once you get to the top and see all the texture stretch and other problems. However, limited to walking around in the canyon, simply breathtaking. The waterfall is one phenomenal touch - especially the animated texture and the particles used for spray. Is this available for use? Purchased or otherwise? Lastly, is the canyon made with a 3D program like 3D Studio? |
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| very nice. |
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| wow ! |
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| Simply great. What I like most about it is the fact that everything seems to fit in the level. You would never doubt that a particular tree or something could really stand there in reality. It would be interesting to know the FPS at higher resolutions though. Are you planning to make a game of it? Would be nice to see more projects that really attract people and may lead them to B3D / BMax. |
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| The ground stuff looks lovely, but the sky is totally hosed -- hall of mirrors with some effects that look like they were meant to be sunup/sundown. Aside from that it's quite nice tho. Betting you're depending on cubemapping there? Radon 9000 Mobility btw. [edit] just re-upped the drivers yesterday too, so it's not them [/edit] |
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| Hi, Yep, the sky is cubemapped, and the grass and trees are all masked because I didn't want to do some z-ordering stuff...In the meantime, Beaker dug out some old z-ordering code he did, and it works a charm. So I'll probably post a 'nicer' version soon. It won't be made into a game, it was made for testing some stuff... I'm glad you like it...there is still much juice left in Blitz3D. Oh, and clou[d] is a small app for making sky boxes/domes/panoramas...It's not done yet... [Edit] It's been updated... |
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| Much better now. Fantastic. |
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| It is quite stunning. And really shows that Blitz3D is far from over. |
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| Yeah there's a few years left in Blitz3d yet :) |
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| This is.. extreme! |
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| Stunning indeed -- very sexy now that the sky isn't blinding me %-} Time for you to get started on Outcast 2 methinks. |
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| Verrrrrrry cool. |
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| Well I'm impressed. :-) |
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| Beautiful. Proper assets make all the difference. :) |
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| Oooh, this looks good - I think I'll take a snifter at the download. Thanks "fredborg" - even though you do occasionaly pick on me in IRC. |
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| now i know my landscapes are ugly ;) looks great ! |
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| How did you texture the rocks? What program did you use? |
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| Bloody hell mate, I'm not easily impressed but this is pretty awesome! Well done! But please get the poolman over to filter that water mate, looks a bit murky ;) danny,- |
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| this is very very nice :) |
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| Lightmaps arent too good and some little Z problems. Walked around and thought there arent much AAA Titels out where walking around is such sweet. Must have something to do with your excellent light setup. Battlefield Nams grass sucks versus yours:-) |
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| All those saying "aren't too good" or "not good enough" please get back to your CUBES. FredBorg - brilliant! I hope it's just the start. Some ultra-fast depth sorting is what I would ask for Blitz3D though - done natively by Mark... UpdateNormals and UpdateDepth or Z. |
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| I liked it very much... collisions were interesting... and off... but I could walk up a wall and play around on top of the map (in one location) sideways texturing... cool! A fantastic effort... when does Vaal have to be fed by the weirdly painted surfer people? (bad reference to Star Trek and that lizard head cave you have!) :) -RZ |
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| impressive. I like how the grass is illuminated in the non-shaded areas. |
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| I really like this. One small request, can you get a little wind blowng in the foliage in the trees too? Seems to me this would make it totally convincing. I've no idea how hard that would be to add, but it's the only thing that even remotely really struck me as perhaps missing. A nice job indeed. Keep at it! |
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| That's excellent sir. Great presentation. But i do have a question..is there suppose to be a river in the demo..because i'm not seeing it. I just see the water fall. ATI 8500le (soon nVidia 6600 GT ) |
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| Hi Fredborg. First of all CONGRATS to one of the most interesting demo in B3d. Is tecnically very solid and even artistically impressive. Would u share with us some of the approaches? 1)How u imported in B3d the Tree(d) models? 2)How u modelled the terrain? (Is i a mesh/terrain or a 3d object)? 3)How u handled the grass? It's really dense, how u managed to animate just the nearby one avoinding long computations for all the level grass? 5)About "shading". How did u shade the grass in relation to the lightmap calculated via Gile(s)? U read the lightmap and set the item illumoination this way? Thanks again. Stefano |
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| Great demo! |
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| As expected, very NICE Fredborg! It even runs a little on my latop with it's puny 16MB GF2... :-) |
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| Hi, Thanks to everybody :) And to answer a few of the questions: Grass: The grass is colored according to the position is is placed on. Ie. it reads the color below the spot where the grass is placed, and applies that to the grass. It's alpha sorted with the system in the code archives. Link in top post. Trees: Made with tree[d], imported into the level with gile[s], and exported to b3d. And yes, it would be easy to animate them, but I didn't :) Sun: The sun flare, is a quad with additive blending rendered in front of everything else. River: Yes, there is supposed to be one. It's cubemapped, so it might not show up on some graphics cards. Collisions: No existant, so you can walk anywhere. It's just a downward line pick. Terrain/Canyon: Modeled in 3dsmax. |
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| Looks loverly :), as good as Dungeon Siege and Gothic 2 anyday =). You should make a RPG with it =) |
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| Resurrecting an old thread here, but I only just got broadband and so only just tried this, although I wanted to ages ago. Absolutely beautiful! What impressed me most (apart from the lush visuals) is how SMOOTH the grass performance is. I tried adding grass to my demo and my frame rate got cut in half, so I'm in the dark about how Fredborg's doing it here with such good performance... |
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| Yeah, waving and zsorting all that grass should affect fps alot, but Fred found a way to easily handle the thing. |
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| Wow, tales from the crypt :) Ok, I'll let you in on the secret to getting super fast zordered animated grass... First of all you will need Beakers excellent zordering thing from here: http://www.blitzbasic.com/codearcs/codearcs.php?code=850 I suggest you use the version posted lower by me, as it is a lot faster at preparing the zordering. A small example of how to use it is located in the last comment/post. It's a good idea to order your grass in clumps or patches, and then hiding and showing them as needed. That will save your graphics card from being over worked. Now, all you need to do is animate the grass... As you probably know mesh manipulation (ie. moving vertices) can be a bit slow, so the trick is not to do that. Instead what you do is rotate the texture... Haha, you've got super fast grass. How nice is that? |
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| Wow, great! Thanks for that... however the only thing I wanted to do differently to your system was to have the grass waving out of synch to appear more natural and random - I wonder if there's a way using your method that can do that? (Maybe using three hundred identical textures!) :) |
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| >>> Instead what you do is rotate the texture...<<< Wow never thought of that. |
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| Hey Fred, you told me that the ground+mountains have been edited in 3Dstudio. Since I suppose u used a "grass map" to place grass in the level, how u obtained the right height for the grass without having some kind of "TerrainHeight#"? |
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| Hi, The grass is placed on areas that have a certain texture. It is possible to calculate the positions without using a heightmap by placing the grass objects along random locations of each triangle. |
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| whoaAAAHHH!!!!! i just saw this... this is just plain terrible of you fred... why do you want to humble people like me who are never gonna get anything like this done in Blitz... got any more demos like this :) fantastic stuff... [added] one thing... a verrry small thing... the swaying motion of the grass and brush... right now, it looks too symetrical... sorta like a back and forth motion of mechanical device... too exact... ...a slight randomness in the distance it moves each cycle, might be enough to make it seem less mechanical and a lil more natural... --Mike |
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| I think because it's the texture being rotated and not mesh deformation it will always seem a little uniform, sadly. One thing Fredborg... I'm interested to know what settings you use for the grass. Is it a Targa file... What EntityFX do you use? BTW I think the sun glare is really nice. Much nicer and more realistic than lens flare. |
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| Hi fred, this is definetly a very nice demo to see! well, if I can only get the correct camera view going that is. Most likely just my piece of crap video card though: Graphic card: Nvidia GForce4 MX 420 Drivers Using: Tried with 66.93 nvidia drivers and latest 71.89 nvidia drivers I get the same graphical problems on both nvidia drivers I have. Here's the link to a temporary website I set up showing 4 pictures taking by fraps of your demo. Two shows graphical problems and two shows no graphical problems. <snip>temp link</snip> PS: Be glad to help you squash the problem if you want. |
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| Hi, mrtricks: It's a png file, and I think the BrushFX used is 'Fullbright + VertexColor + TwoSided'. Pepsi: I had the same thing on a GeForce2-GTS (my GeForce4-Ti4200 had popped), I think it's because there's too little video memory. The one I had it on had 32Mb Ram, and I know that another person had the same issue on a 32Mb graphics card. |
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| So the png has an alpha channel, or do you have a separate alpha texture? |
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| The png file has an alpha channel. The grass texture was made with tree[d] :) |
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| Ah so. Thanks! |
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| Ahhh... to bad we cant use .dds format on them there textures... :/ yeah, mine uses 32meg of vram also |
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| I just tried this on my Toshiba Portege a200 laptop with Intel Extreme. It runs wonderfully, but for some reason the sky is black! Any idea why this is? |
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| I agree, the plants and grass now look sweet - before they looked a little harsh. IPete2. |
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| Dock, no idea... maybe limited graphics card memory? It's the last thing that is loaded, so that seems like a logical explanation. |
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| Sorry to resurrect this old post. This is a really great example of what can be done in B3D. Unfortunately much of what makes this look so good is beyond me (like the cool sun effect). Fredborg, it has been a few years since you dropped this on us. How about a look at the source and your techniques:? It would greatly benefit this community (meaning me :) It would probably drive up sales by re-invigorating Giles as well. Also how about a Clou[d] demo while we're at it. Heck I'd pay for the source or extra for Giles if it was included ... Thanks for your consideration, Allan |
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| excellent demo, runs at over 100fps on my system - nvidia 6600gt . this is at 1280x1024x32 As for people making negative feedback which hints at being insulting, simply ask where their demo is... |
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| Come on "fredborg" - hand over the code and the media and everything else you have squirrelled away. The sun would look great in my Blitz Oblivion - my media would make your code look good. |
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| Impressive!!!! Please fredborg, a example with source code of the sun effect. Thanks for this demo. |
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| Hand it over "fredborg". I need to check the code - just to make sure you did not steal any of it. ps - code and media - the whole package. |
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| Best blitz demo ever. Would love to play around with this. It's so far above my head but would be fun to get a peek of how Fredborg's done this. Getting 680 fps!? Hmmm. New system is better than I thought;) Gnu Athlon64 X2 2500mhz, Geforce 7900GTX, 2Gig DDR2 400mhz. |
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| please, please, show the code of the program. To try it… ; -) |
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