My first UT2003 map

[Old Geezer]

I have made my first UT2003 map, its called DM-Grozny. Here are some screenshots – the patchy lighting you can see is caused by the moving shadow thrown by the smoke and cloud layer in the sky – this is fully animated in the actual map. The smoke from the burning buildings is also fully animated.

During the Christmas break I locked myself in a dark room (my wife was pleased) and started to learn how to map using the new engine. There was a lot to learn and I have just scratched the surface I think. When UT2003 came out I was disappointed in the new engine and its mapping systems but having really played around with it I think its got enormous potential.

The only way to really learn how to map is to make a real map and that’s what I have done. Its yet another war torn city map (sorry guys but I love doing war torn cities) and its based on Grozny the capital city of the breakaway Chechnya republic, a city which has twice been assaulted by the full force of the Russian army in the last 10 years.

Because it was my first attempt to make a UT2003 map I made a lot of mistakes and I think the map will be too slow to ever be used online. Knowing what I now know I would have approached it very differently and built in a lot more optimisation. As it was I just pressed ahead and pushed the new engine to its limits to see what it could do.

Hopefully I can apply what I have learnt to my next UT2003 map.

 

[Old Geezer]

Here are some more screenshots, the first shows the view from inside the ruined factory looking up through the roof. The second shows the interior of a bombed apartment block viewed from the balcony of the apartment block opposite.

 

[[SOB]bAd ChIcKeN]

HOLY SH!T OG! That looks simply awesome man, you should be really really proud of that one. And I am now really excited about the future potential of INF. Thanks for the bright spot in a gloomy day!

 

[Old Geezer]

If anyone is interested there is more info about the war and Grozny here
http://www.csis.org/ruseura/ex002.html

and here are some photos from the city
http://users.westnet.gr/~cgian/grozny.htm

 

[FieldMedic]

And you learned to map in UT2003 during Christmas ?

Awesome, cant wait to see future maps from you if this one is your first UT2003 map.

 

[Crowze]

Very nice work, excellent textures, as always. I think Angelheart has a very close contender now .

 

[OICW]

Useless Future Map Suggestion #1: an old Russian airfield would be a great map IMO

 

[NTKB]

OG what about the older regular UT maps you were working on? Any word if your gonna finish those?

 

[Old Geezer]

OG what about the older regular UT maps you were working on? Any word if your gonna finish those?

Yes I will but its been hard to pull myself away from the new editor while I was on a roll.

 

[[C22]-Mort]

Nice Work!

i can see a new game-mode coming.....FTS-INF (Find The Sniper)

 

[Fat Marrow]

Very nice... :tup:

Mind me asking what 3d package you're using for that? How are you getting on with lighting those pesky static meshes?

 

[Old Geezer]

To be honest I have yet to get to grips with a 3d program, I have several on my Mac and PC and cannot decide which one to use. I thought about using MAYA as the version bundled with UT2003 comes with a static brush export function I believe. Does anyone else use this app and what do you think of it?


I made the static meshes in Grozny inside Unrealed, which I know is not recommended but if you keep them relatively simple and rectangular I think you can get away with it. The balconies on the apartment blocks are an example of this, they are made completely from a set of rectangles so making it in Unrealed seems to work OK. I think if you use Unrealed to make curvey shapes or complex shapes then you start to have problems.

I also discovered you can reskin existing meshes that ship with UT with new textures and I did this in this map as well (you reskin on an individual mesh by mesh basis so one mesh can have many different appearances). The other thing I did was convert meshes to brushes. I did this for two reasons, one was to make a cutting tool using rock meshes from UT2003 to cut the damage holes in the building. The second thing I did was to turn the UT mesh into a BSP brush and then retexture and then convert back into a static mesh. I did this because although you can reskin a mesh sometimes the way the textures are arranged on the mesh surface means you cannot get the effect you want and you need to move and align the textures on a BSP brush before converting it into a mesh.

Lighting the meshes, and the map is harder. Generally I turn the scaleglow setting for all meshes to 0.2 and I use a mixture of the sunlight actor, the levels ambient/zone light and positioned lights (many of which are spotlights). I also used the projector actor for the panning smoke shadow. I think the projector actor has a lot of potential for some very cool effects. I almost always make the outside lighting have a yellow tinge because I think its more natural looking.

 

[Vega-don]

hey old geezer i asked you in the thread you made about the map in dev (a city) , if i could Eas macedonia night , and theires details of the layout...

waiting your answer

 

[DarkBls]

Is there an automated way to convert UT, UT2K3, UT2K4 maps between them ?

 

[Fat Marrow]

To be honest I have yet to get to grips with a 3d program, I have several on my Mac and PC and cannot decide which one to use. I thought about using MAYA as the version bundled with UT2003 comes with a static brush export function I believe. Does anyone else use this app and what do you think of it?

I had a go with the Maya PLE which came with UT2k3; despite being familiar with UnrealEd, it's a whole new thing to learn (slowly), and there's a lot of obscure things you have to figure out for yourself (hopefully many of these are now covered in the UnrealWiki Maya FAQ).

I got to the point (working on only one as yet unreleased and unfinished map) of being able to bang out static meshes with (pretty much) the geometry of my choice, but I found skinning hard (partly because of the PLE's deliberate limitations) and getting nice looking meshes impossible (because you can't -- to my knowledge -- bake light maps [without a watermark] with the PLE edition, and this is a fairly fatal limitation IMO).

I was looking into buying LightWave (at £1,000 it's hideously expensive, but very cheap compared to Maya, 3dmax etc) on the basis it would do light maps (and presumably anything else I need). If it can import into UT as well as UT2k3 I might go for it... anyone tried this out? (NB yes I know there are *other* ways to get software)

 

[Fat Marrow]

Is there an automated way to convert UT, UT2K3, UT2K4 maps between them ?

Due to the difference in engine design, there's no point converting UT maps to UT2kx (they'd run pretty much as fast and you couldn't add much to them), and UT2kx maps wouldn't have about 0.001 FPS in UT if the conversion could even be done...

Edit: but UT2k3 and UT2k4 maps should (I think) be completely interchangeable, aside from UT2k4-specific stuff (like vehicles, but maybe even that -- it just won't do anything in UT2k3).

 

[DarkBls]

Just wondering what we will do with all our good UT/INF maps when we will have INF 2k3/4

 

[Fat Marrow]

Just wondering what we will do with all our good UT/INF maps when we will have INF 2k3/4

Something tells me that

(a) a hard core will carry on with INF 2.9
(b) we'll just have to 'let go' of the old ones, not least since the new ones will rock even more
(c) I wouldn't hold your breath

 

[NotBillMurray]

I have no idea how this is, but you could look into GMAX as a temporary modeling tool. For all I know it's the Playskool of modeling stuff, but it's free.

 

[Fat Marrow]

I have no idea how this is, but you could look into GMAX as a temporary modeling tool. For all I know it's the Playskool of modeling stuff, but it's free.

I've not used that one, but I don't think it can export in the right formats and/or it also can't do more exciting stuff like baking lightmaps. Otherwise it's good for learning 3dmax, I suppose.