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

[Telarus]

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?

[Telarus]

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.