You can take my advice or leave it, but I think the reason you're having problems with lighting is your skybox is completely unfitting for this map (assuming you're still using the same one from the first posts in this thread, although they may have just been temporary). This map seems to emit the feel of "impending storm" when I look at it. I think you should start with recreating a 2d skybox texture that has mostly full cloud cover, with heavy darkness in the distance, although not to the severity of emp_canyon. Once you have the skybox in place, go back to the overall lighting and try for a darker feel that emphasizes shadows. I think that'll fix your lighting problems and by proxy will fix your unhappiness with the textures, too. EDIT: Damnit deadpool
This was the reference pic i used to create the textures and lighting: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/234836/mapping/emp_chain/mitchell_lake_pond.jpg I would think that any skybox should work with any terrain, if the lighting is good. Any terrain in real life looks just as realistic in the morning, evening, night ... etc. It's just that i couldn't figure out why everything looked so white all the time, no matter the intensity and color of the light i used. As if the engine desaturated all my textures Immensly, and afterwards brightened it up a lot. The reason i find this incredibly strange, is that none of this happened in vehicletraining, frost, arid or bush. In those maps i simply made the textures, set the lighting options, tested it ingame, made one or two predicted changes to the textures and light, and voila. Not in Chain though. Anyway, yesterday i darkened all textures, and moved the light even further into bright colors, resulting in the top down view that i posted here. While this wasn't at all what i was after, i ended up liking the colors quite a lot. It does feel like "impending storm" as you said Zanarias. So i decided to stay with it, as the textures now finally matched and had some true colors in them. This did indeed mean, like you said Deadpool, that i had to change the skybox to a more orange one. So i tested it with the sunset skybox used in cyclopean i think (i've noticed that skybox exists twice, once in light dayblue and once in orange sunset colors, not sure which of the two cyclopean uses). And yes, it looked way better than all my previous attempts. I'll try to improve on this still, but if i can't make it better, i think i could safely use the current settings. And unfortunately Zanarias, i never bothered to learn to make 2D skyboxes.
either way it's gonna be awesome, those trees are sick! why arent there other maps using those awesome pine trees?
Copyright These are the ones from HL2: Episode 2. Apparantly i'm allowed to use them in custom maps, but they can't be added as part of game/mod, so no official map can use them. It's a shame though, as they look good. But even better, they have awesome lod levels so they still look good from far away (unlike empire's orex trees which for some reason change color from a distance) and have a suprising minimal effect on performance. Although even those trees have to be used sparsely on big maps.
To begin with, it's awesome that you're not a total ass like some mappers I've met, some are utterly stuck up and way adamant on their positions to take advice or even consider it, so props to you. That said, still got some things to say here. Skyboxes can't work with any terrain because you have to take into account recent or upcoming weather conditions (or at least try and imitate them). It might just be me, but the major reason I've been saying it looks like your map is in that "impending storm" mode is because the grass texture personally reminds me of conditions right after or before one, which is why I'm pushing for an overcast skybox texture. That might just be me, though. Anyway, I'm sure you'll get it down, but it'd be cool if you could take an updated shot from the ground as well.
I will post a few screenshots when i've improved the brushwork a bit. All other details will probably not be shown untill the release
Don't get your hopes up ;-) It's not because i want something to become better, that i succeed in it before i get tired of it. There's a reason i stopped working on this map twice before ;-) Same case for all of my previous maps for that matter. Anyway, i have added a few details, but i haven't yet touched lighting etc. But i'll post a few screenshots anyway:
Looks amazing, especially the texture work. I didn't read most of the thread, so I don't know if you're going to touch it, but the lighting makes it look a little bland though. I'm not entirely sure, but a change of lighting might make the colours stand out a bit more.
We're exactly 1 month later, and i have made significant progress. I managed to get the colors and light pretty much exactly as i wanted it. It's also the first time that this map actually looks better ingame than in the screenshots. I also finally figured out how i want the concrete part of the map to look. I've done 1/4 of the north with this idea in mind. With the exception of rounding off some corners this is how the entire concrete part will look like in the end: [/IMG] Not much remains to be done at this stage. The north will go pretty fast now that i know how i want it. Half the time it's copy pasting stuff to the next area i'm finishing
I finally like the lighting. The map seems visually small though. You may well be using the entire hammer grid, but it feels small in the same sense that emp_research and emp_raiders feel small. You can see from one end of the map to the other. Did you think about raising some of the inaccessible terrain that isn't in the skybox?
On screenshots definitely. Ingame it was very bland though, and it's not as colorfull ingame as the new screenshots make it look
