As can be seen in the first post the level is blocky, empty and place-holder textured.
Beeing happy with the rough outline of the mountain, details now need to be planned and implemented.
The player needs to see actuall contoured cliff walls with butresses, outcrops and cracks in abundance, small rocks and pebbles lying around and plant life where appropriate.

This is my tecnique for aiding visualisations

The domes represent view range from the camera and placements are set to slightly overlap in order to sort out the show and fade calls as LOD steps


The blank level area (1) with back ground trees inserted.



Completing the visualisation with rocks, paths and boulders as well as fore ground trees


Composition is set to generate 'viewing arches' for the viewer to draw attention into the area immediatly in front of the player. The completed design set from position2,start_pos.view




The resultant new models to make and set for LOD calls (scene managment)

wow. this all seems very clever. i like the concept of 'viewing arches' -- it makes perfect sense, but i haven't heard the term before.

looks like you know what you're doing. and it looks very interesting.

julz

I wish all of you guys all of the best of luck with your project If you need a texture or something that I might be able to get done in about hour, I'd luv to contribute.

GL

Jesse

you have a very complex workspace i see. but cleverly solved. great workaround of the acknex restrictions. i wish to see the stage in a final form, maybe a comparsion shot ofthe composition view (with lines and visible blockades)and the final view as it will appear in game...

your models need work, though...

Thanks for the kind words folks, there very much appreciated.

@ JulzMighty, Viewing arches, holes, angles etc are all Traditional Art related terms describing composition aspects and ratios to engender viewer manipulation.

@ oldschoolj, thanks, might chase you up on that one day

@ sPIKe, the shots will come later as what is shown above is just for one scene point at the actual start of the game.
The next LOD step view centre needs to go thru the same process as well as reverse views to ensure all angles have been covered.

Models have tons of work to do yet, tweaking, building, skinning, animating and base scripting.

At the moment we are setting up our remote work environment so things will pick up later on.

No demos will be offered for a very long time.

I think this technique is wonderful, and will surely implement it as I do my work! As long as a person does only very rough additions, just to get the idea if something will work right, or look good, this is a great way to set up the gameplay.

Once the ideas and levels are all in place, then it's time to create the good models and textures.

The domes are a great idea too, and i have done something similar to guage what the LOD should be in a particular level.

I don't nee to see the shaders now, i can already see with those basics how things could look

Great work!

- Jason

Yes, its a good technique for roughin out, glad you like it.
It saves heaps in imagining how any part is going to look and feel.

Shaders will be looked at the last stage and will be needed for underground lakes, and other low end effects.

Slin has translated a model mipmap script for me so thats going in asap.

Thanks for the positive response,
cheers...

I really like your approach.
It shows that you have thought about the common problems which arise when creating levels.

Waiting for new screenshots

Thanks Firoball, my stuff gets too complicated for a graphics oriented person so I need to create images to see where I am going.



As can be determined, completed level sketch passes milestone_1 and here we can see all the elements that comprise the level.
Each sub-level is loaded up when the player pos triggers a call and the subsequent one gets deleted.

I am having a few probs with A7.07 as sectioned models seem to corrupt randomly and per engine call, still sorting this mess but it puts a hell of hold on progress for what I want to achieve. The only other way is to have the complet level model load as a single structure at this stage, not good.

Its now a breeze to reference each segment and build accordingly but still have scope for additions/subtractions and so forth and all LOD requirements can be easily determined.

Doc_1 here

If anyone can spare modeling time, we need an enormous amount of sub-models made up for the LOD stages per model.

I expected that you are going to use the BSP-system, because it is especially usefull for tunnel and cave levels. It is not necessary to see any of the level blocks, for the BSP you use blocks just to divide the level into sections of visibility.
From your picture I can see several points where you could easely seperate parts of the level by walls of blocks.