Level design process 1

First half of the video is about the 3dsMax-file and the second shows how it actually looks in the games graphics engine.
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Current state of a level I'm making for a game project called Project Vulgaris.

The theme is "bombed forest". I'm aiming for a mood similiar to Terminator future-war scenes but set in a destroyed forest.

The graphics engine is Ogre3D and the exporter I'm using is OgreMax.
Technically this is a fairly simple level. It has two big basic geometry meshes, one for the play area, another for the background. These use vertex colours to mix four different textures smoothly. They also have a pre-rendered lightmap.

The props and detail-meshes have been combined to form single objects (usually so that one game screen would show one prop-cluster) and use a single diffuse texture and vertex colours for pre-rendered lighting.

The level is not optimized at all except for the prop clusters. I'll probably remove all the invisible polygons sometime but it seems to run just fine as is.
(Triangle count is ~46 000)

Running on this PC:
Intel Core2Duo E6550 (2x 2,3ghz)
2GB RAM
Geforce 8600GT

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• game
• development
• level
• design
• platform
• indie
• 3ds
• max
• ogre3d
• ogremax

[SurroundType]

looks very nice, one question - how does ogre export plugin deal with lightmaps, does it build them itself or 3ds does it?

[runnerelf]

@SurroundType

The lighting was rendered in 3dsmax. You'll also have to make the ogre3d materials for lightmapped and vertex-lit objects.

[jorgeerosa]

If you add audio this could be an awesome 3DMax + Ogre 3D tutorial! Very impressive work! :D

[runnerelf]

Interesting idea, I'll see if there's a gap for such a tutorial. I couldn't find one anyhow :)

I suppose you mean audio commentary instead of game environment sounds. But yeah, let's see when it gets finished. Thanks for the comment :)

[randomukko]

The background work very well, enough "parallax-layers" and good looking. Like the idea that you present the difference with Ogre from the playing perspective instead of just rolling some model in Max. Although the stuff doesn't seem too modular - will it be unique custom models all the way?

[runnerelf]

Thanks, it is fairly modular because parts of the main geometry can be easilly copied and modified to form new parts. I'm using XRayUnwrap so unwrapping stuff again is fairly effortless. All the props (rocks, pillars, boards etc..) are just duplicates but they're combined later to form a single mesh and can be edited to some extent after that. Of course these prop clusters can be easilly copied to different places again.

[RatmanXX]

Very nice level design! Not boring, very detailed, lot of stuffs, nice job!

Can you tell me how to generate lightmap in 3ds max to an other mapping channel?

I didn't find any useful tutorial about it yet :S

[Lben18]

yeah!.. really cool.. i hope we'll have a demo to download and test.. Good job!

[runnerelf]

Cheers! I hope we'll get a prototype of the game made during this autumn. More detail coming :)