April 2012 Entry: Gladiator

[Fury]

You can see the shading is off from where I cut and pasted many short beams into a long one - this I will need to fix up somehow (any ideas? smudge won't work here).

Get a longer beam? Or highlight the beam and replace with a seamless texture.

[Jacktannery]

I've been working on the edges of the flooded stadium. No matter how much time I spend trying to get it right it always looks unfinished. I hate this map more then ever.

### LATEST WIP ###

[Coyotemax]

for what it's worth, you should definitely not hate this. it's coming along VERY NICELY.

That having been said I understand the love/hate relationship with my own work

One thought about the water - i would expect to see that colour of water if it was deep and had a light or white coloured bottom, like a pool.. but for something that was built the way you describe this i might expect it to look a bit more muddy. maybe just drop the transparency of the water and let the bottom show through?

Of course, maybe whoever built it had more of an aesthetic sense and deep pockets so it really is lined iwth light coloured slate/limestone/tile

[Jacktannery]

I am not going to have the time to do what I wanted with this map, so I'm going to leave it as it is. It has been an education and I have learned a lot.

Somewhat disappointing to me, is that I now realise I could have achieved a much better map in a tiny fraction of the time if I had just grabbed some good tourist or aerial photos of the Colosseum and copied, pasted and rotated them around until I had an amphitheatre. This would have probably resulted in a more realistic map, and I could have spent my time focusing on the actual arena and atmosphere rather than the stands.

Something else I have learned - to have a much clearer concept of what I want to achieve from the onset, and to focus on that instead of on side-issues. In this case too much of my focus was on the seating and tiers, which don't really add much to the map in the end, when I should have put more time and energy on the central arena.

The finished map feels too sterile, uninteresting and empty. It lacks any cinematic quality. Still, I enjoyed contributing to this challenge and hopefully will take part in another one soon.

EDIT: having said all that, there are still things that I like about my map:
1) I like my use of dark green in colouring and shading the stadium - a non intuitive choice that I feel worked out really well.
2) The map looks really great in thumbnail form, or when you step back from the screen and squint at it without your glasses on.

Final map (same as the ones above):
### LATEST WIP ###