Thread: 3D Atlas of Barsaive [Earthdawn] using Unreal3/UDK

This looks very interesting. I will keep an eye on your thread to see the latest developments.

Good Job Mate! Keed Doing!

Giving the amount of airships and dragons flying around in earthdawn, this seems like a great idea.

Well, it's not a huge update (I'm working on texture "splatting" before a final shadow-map build), but here's a shot of one of the Named Peaks showing my sun & sky setup, with "light shafts", an atmospheric perspective heightfog, and depth-of-field blurring. You can also see a hint of the specular highlights (which move in real time) on the river in front of the camera.

So, I'm working on getting final textures (rock, grasslands, forest canpoy, swamp/mud) and details onto the terrain, and building the Markers that I'm going to be marking Named Places with.

Can you explain what is going on in that second shot. Is it that in the distance there is a mountain and this is casting a shadow towards the camera ? It looks a bit odd tho. I think the shadow is too severe. If the mountain were so far away then the maximum depth of shadow would be that of the grey tint that the mountains to the left of it are producing since they must also be in shadow too. Are you able to set the blackness of the god rays shadow based on the distance to the shadow inducing terrain ? The lighting on those mountains to the left looks great tho.

Ah, yes, lining up a peak silhouette with the sun probably wouldn't be a good idea IRL (OUCH!). This was an extreme example (the pics were to answer a question on another forum). Here is another series of shots showing those effects, and how the total final effect changes depending on elevation and thus view angle:









The extreme shadowing in the last shot is an example of the Unreal3 engine 'compensating' for not being able to actually achieve the real light intensity from the sun, so the engine fakes what your eye would do when confronting that situation, by simulating the sensory contrast effects that happen with physical light. Real-time engines these days, right?

Note: Everything looks mch more "daylight" than the first shots and the shadows are doing a lot of the work filling in the colors (notice the color saturation differences from the previous shots). This allows the blue rivers (and their white highlights) to 'pop' visually. Shots are from above the Tylon Mts, looking towards Throal and over the Servos Jungle towards Lake Ban.

Sometimes I don't know what do do with myself while I wait for something to render. For example, this current a rain simulation cycle I'm in the middle of takes 2 hours to draw the river valleys so I know where to paint rocky ridges, and where to paint lush valleys (where the Horror blight isn't). Not to mention the 4+ previous hours spent doing iteration after iteration of 30 minute 'low resolution' Rain cycles, tweaking, doing another, tweaking, until I found the right settings for the full 2 hr simulation.

Fortunately, that means I've time for a few more screenshots! Again, click for full size.

Some _extremely_ high altitude "dragon's eye views" of Barsaive. The last one has some notes on where I'm probably going to put Bartertown/Throal and the actual distance scale used (which I noted earlier will probably be tweaked for ED travel times). I want the engine to eventually output the distance between two points in purely ED travel times and rough KM/Miles distances. But that's going to wait on the art side a bit.

That just looks amazing!