[Amnesia] Screenshot criticism thread

[CarnivorousJelly]

10x38, I tried getting rid of 50%, which made it look like the ground was balding.

[JonnyAnomaly]

It might be worth importing the grass into Blender or Maya, duplicating it a few times and combine them, then export them as one object. At least then you'd cover more ground with fewer objects.

[Kman]

you really don't need the entire map to be covered in grass and most of the time if you do it ends up looking really boring/unrealistic. in real life forest floors usually aren't solid grass like that, it's like some patches of grass here and there with rocks and other plants scattered throughout it. a rule of thumb i use for making outdoor areas is you should have the same amount of grass models as you do rocks/dirt piles/other plants/whatever the fuck else you can fit in to make it look good

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apparently i've retrogressed as a mapper back like a year

OH WELL
anyways i did this last night

[CarnivorousJelly]

Regarding my map: that is true, I might have to break the monotony a bit, but you don't really get to explore the actual forest in this section and the inside is supposed to be an over-grown courtyard. Other than weeds, I'm thinking it would be quite a bit of grass.

Regarding your map: I like the composition and layout :D The lighting feels a bit "off" for some reason to me, I think it's the contrast, but blue/yellow usually works so maybe I'm just a bit crazy. Other than that, the floor looks a little bit too clean around the pillars and corners - shouldn't dust be collecting in hard-to-reach areas if the rest of the room is dirty? The billboards look really neat, I like the halo effect.

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Anyways, final opinions on the final version of the courtyard? I added some flowers and shrubs based on Kman's comment - although they seem to be not visible in these screenshots for some reason :\

Spoiler below!

I tried adding puddles previously, but they looked really ugly. I also realized this was missing billboards just now, but I'm not going to retake the screenshots because I'm lazy and I have other stuff that needs doing :p

Also, you're all way too nice to me, sorry for being so high-maintenance :)

[Streetboat]

only suggestion I have is that the tree model isn't really meant to stand on its own- it was meant to be wrapped around a column. The roots would be too weak to hold up a trunk like that, twisting as it is. You can fix that either by having that model wrap around another pine tree or by lowering it so the roots go deeper into the ground.

[Hardarm]

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Or you can be creative and make lots of those 'trees' put into branches that cover the bricks in the castlebase section, as I did with one ALITD map C:

[Rapture]

@Kianda - You said you put down shrubs, but I will just repeat it again anyways. I would take bushes and spread them around, in patterns... (Make them at the same height of the grass or taller for some of the bushes.)

Variation 1: Place one shrub (Size 0.9), next start putting down slightly smaller shrubs along one size so it takes the appearance of a decaying wall. Make sure you rotate each one slightly to keep it natural looking.

Variation 2: Place a larger shrub (Size 1.75) and start placing shrubs around in a circular pattern (2nd row), repeat again for a 3rd row.

Bind the shrubs together, and use the Variation 1 around walls and trees, while Variation 2 for in the middle of grass fields...
And rotate/scale these so it doesn't look to obviously copy-pasted.


Another note on your tall grass, at the end of your path which leads into the courtyard. Either have the grass slowly ramp down, or place some extra short grass to ease the transition. (Kinda hard to tell either way with your picture.)

[WALP]

As far as I understand you only want your objects seperated for culling purposes(when it comes to performance in HPL2). If you won't be able to go out and explore much, but just be in that courtyard then you should be able to gain quite a lot of performance by combining some of them.
Well at least the things that are close, I kinda have a little fear combining the things that are far away might confuse HPL2 so it does not use mip-maps properly, and ends up rendering distant objects in a high-res. hopefully an expert can correct me on this

[JonnyAnomaly]

Do you mean combining them in the level editor? Will that have an effect of performance?

[WALP]

I was refering to doing so in a 3d software by importing things, setting them up and exporting it as one file.
But if you can do in the level editor then go for it cause its a lot less work