Be careful with transitions,
When you asseble the level out of unattached models,
And you have floor or wall elements that are curved, you
will see a "gab" in the elumination (model lightshading)

Try to have "flat" connections between the elements to
avoid visible gabs in the elumination.

I've now made 6 new template parts for corridors with doors in, again these are individual parts and therefore wont be rotated when building dynamic dungeons.



I need to create a set of doorways for the single wall tiles now, which means I will potentially create another 21 parts...

Wow I don't even want to start thinking about truly 3D dungeon building yet, but I know when I come to create the upper and lower level parts this list will expand to massive proportions!

@Gumby: I did some thinking about how to make these tiles as smaller parts, seperate walls and interchangable componenets etc. My only potential question here is that maybe I should have seperated the floor from the walls... Still I am also keen on using World Normal maps instead of Tangent maps as the parts have consistant facing, so this will really help the shader give me a very good look.

Thanks for the comments, working out all these parts is really baking my noodle

@Damocles: What to you mean by transitions, I am not sure I fully understand what you mean. You mention that lighting illumination might be off? or am I miss understanding you completely?

If you dont need to tile your textures over the level-chunks, because the chunks aren´t to big to use 1024*1024 (or even 512*512) textures than it is definetly the way to go since Object/Worldspace normalmapping is faster and looks better in same cases

This was my thinking Hummel exactly.

From working with other game engines, especially CryEngine, I have a healthy respect for shader work and know that anything that can squeeze the performance and get better results is worth investing in.

As all the parts are built in 3DsMax, when a full art pass is done with these parts being carefully modeled, we will texture bake them to generate world normal maps, specular maps and so on, as well as some AO either as part of the diffuse or even as a shader.

I would love to get a nice shader that gives all these options with some good support for dynamic lights, this would greatly improve the visual aesthetic.

So I am working on the final set of doorways which gives me another 16 parts...

I allways forget the term.
Its the polygon lightdistribution, that makes
the smooth lightshading.
(in contrast to flat shading)

If you have polygons that are attached on the same vertecies,
they share the lightditributuion, and the polygons
have a smooth lighttransition.
If you have two models, you will have a gab in the elumination,
as they are of course not attached polygons.

Best is to test that in the engine using dynamic light, and you will see what i mean.

I think I understand you, the point where the models join might create some artifacts due to how the lighting sytem works. Thanks for the tip, I will look at them as soon as I am ready to test.

I've now got the complete set, 76 individual parts, which I am now going to export as MDLs and start building a grid with them. It's early days but I am already trying to think about the right naming conventions to use in order for the engine to manage them suitably.

Trying to think ahead about potential for dynamic maps as well as some kind of middle map editor so that my designers could construct maps themeselves...

Anyway 76 models to export...

tessellation?

No actually Gouraud shading..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouraud_shading

It can bee tricky but perhabs modifying the normalmap (or the maps generally since they where not filtered over the seams) at the borders could help to reduce the artifacts. Another possibility is to use a pp-effect to blur a little bit over the seams

yeah, but having proper tessellation (the density and spread dof the vertices) is what makes gouraud shading look ok, thats why I was confused.