Hey
I decided to rebuild a very old level of mine for the conitec winter contest.
I am working on it for about one week now. The only thing left are some more models and a way to have the textures on the terrain less streched on mountains.
After some time I know decided just to take the basis of the original level.

This is what it looked like 2 years ago:


And here are screens from the remake:

This is a very early screenshot of my watershader:


I played around with depth of field with a dynamic focus, but commented it out now because of a not that great feeling when playing with it (I now understand why its usually only used for cutscenes ):



And I just had to add shadowmapping :


I now added a waterfall to it and did some other small things:




On the last screenshots you can see the watershader with reflection and refraction, the waterfall ffp-effect (just some UV-shifting), bloom, vertexshaderanimated grass, normalmapping, multitexture terrainshader with per pixellightening and variance shadowmapping.

The trees and bushes as well as the waterfallmodel and the terrain textures are from loopix and the "ruin" is a freebe from dexsoft.

I am quite happy with the results
C&C wanted and thanks for reading this post (watching the screenshots)
Slin

The screens might not look fantastic at all, but I'm really anxious to see how this turns out. Most of my levels don't really look much better than this, and I can't seem to improve it either. As you said, stretched textures on terrains, sharp edged sides of big terrain hills and not really good models are a problem, but also the "made-with-3dgs" feeling wont go away very quickly. Somehow models never seem to be part of the environment, like the underside of grass or trees.

I hope you manage to turn this into something really nice. If you find ways to fix these problems, it would be a good example for (IMO) many developpers.

What I did learn is, that when you divide your invironment in much smaller parts rather than one big terrain, you get the feeling of a much bigger environment. A different problem that occures though is the blending to different parts. You'll need to cover or stitch the sews with trees/rocks/grass/water, small 'sewing' terrain parts or other, to me unknown, methods to blend two areas to eachother so it wont be visible for the player.

Anyhow, I hope you can manage to create something nice, and receive some tips how to solve such problems .

Good luck!

Very interesting approach!
The light atmosphere is unique.

I would change the grass against some of Loopix' plants. The row of grass in a single sprite doesn't work visually.
The same with the leaves of the tree, they need a modeled and more round shape without intersections to each other.

The steep slopes can get rid of the smearing when you save the terrain as a model too. You can change the uv-layout of the slopes then. Scale the distance between the opposing slopes a bit down and addit to the level.

The stones under the waterfall look good, but they need a transition to the environment.

All in all, this sort of small valley between steep slopes gives a certain suspense.
Did you try how it looks - especially the shadows - within a day night cycle?
Do you already have a gameplay or story for this?

Thanks for your comments
I will darken the ground under the trees and the stones a bit. That should make them fit a bit better.
I have an idea on how to get rid of the texturestreching on the slopes (I know the way with a model but I am really bad at UV-mapping...), but have still some problems to realise it-.-
A day night cycle wouldn´t really work as it is now. the plants are lightened independent of the sun and the shadows would get a quite strange behavior (but id basicly work for them)
And no, I don´t have a gamplay/story/what ever for it yet...

About the grass and trees:
I think they are okay looking from the perspective they can be seen from by the player, just not from those I mainly used fr the screenshots.
Here is an other one showing how it looks for the player:


I will also use a brighter texture for the mountains.

I know there is a way to project the textures always in direction of the normals. That would help your terrain a lot. Maybe we can find out how that works.

All in all I like the scene. but the texture for the grass does not fit to the texture of the grass models. So I think that causes that look.But if you change that and the issue with the terrain it will turn out really good.

PS: did you got it to get the shadowmapping work property?

You really are a shader freak Slin (in the positive way)
The waterfall looks amazing, maybe abit to much bloom but I guess you used that much to create a quite unique scene qua light. One thing I noticed is that on the highest steeps of your terrain, the texture is abit stretched
Anyway, looks very promising !!

Cheers

Frazzle

I don't like the layout of the level. the thing looks great, but it's basically a flat plane with mountains around it. there's just two levels of height, plus one thin river...

http://www.bildarchiv-boden.de/kula/kg/Bach-Neuffen-Fruehjahr-klaresWasser.jpg
I think you should add a dirt texture in some places. the green's too consistent.
there should be a slower transition (at least in some places) between (way too) rocky mountains and grass plane...

it looks amazing though!
Micha

Thanks for all your ideas
My problem at the moment is that I´ve got a lot of things to do and not really the time to realise all the ideas-.-
Because of that I decided to come to an end with this project and just added a little bit of life to this scene (2 fishes and 4 birds).
I also tried myself on modelling some reed. The texture turned out quite bad but anyways I added it to the level

You can download it here:
http://files.filefront.com/Demoscene/;9529229;/fileinfo.html

Please tell me if it runs at an exaptable speed and if everything works
Thanks!

Not bad Performance seems to be good in relation to the visual quality! But hey...Slin...you are not ment to fool around with building levels. YOUR mission in this community is to get the shadow shader working without any issues! DID YOU GET THAT

...and now get back to the shadow shader work or I order you to write 1000x "I shall finish the shaodow shader first!"...all hand written and without bluuuum