Advices/Ideas for tech ceilings?

[Octillion]

So I'm working on a really big tech map built inside a volcano. The player gets to explore the entire tech facility, a forge and furnace exploiting the lava, labyrinth caverns inside,  and the mountainous outskirts around the volcano. And I seem to have been stuck in a tech area for quite sometime now.

 

The ceiling of said area just looks completely bland. I've already used lights, vents, piping and ceiling support beams to give it some flare. But it just seems lackluster in the end. Do you have any ideas/advices you can give on a tech ceiling?

[baja blast rd.]

I am guessing you are piling on fine-grain detail that doesn't alter the shape of the ceiling much, leaving you with what is still a flat ceiling, just with lots of micro-detailing etched on it. Small areas can work with flatter ceilings or even call for them (imagine the trivial case of a tiny cubby), but large ones, provided they have actual proper ceilings, probably won't.  

 

A strong approach is to direct initial efforts at architecture and shape, and then work on the smaller-scale detail. You can see examples below. These principles are independent of theme.

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

An alternative is leaving the ceiling as sky or void or ... liquid ... or raising it unreachably out of view. Walls, facades, or other perimeter constructs will carry instead. But you can't always do that, and when you do, it should be because it fits what you are going for, not out of laziness. 

 

Edited October 28, 2019 by rdwpa

[elend]

Damn, that last shot. That's a nice ceiling. 

[Octillion]

You hit the nail on the head, it's a big room (I think about 1664x1664) with a flat ceiling and lots of micro-details. I did place a sky in the middle of the room with a transparent ceiling below it, but I'll probably make it into a portal sector to the upper floor of the tech base.

 

Weak point is architecture... I usually play wads for the game play and not study the design, I'll have to replay a few of them to get a better understanding now. 

 

Thanks for the advice.

[printz]

Real life tech halls tend to have huge ventilation pipes at the ceiling. I've always found it cool to see them exposed. 

[reflex17]

This has happened to me more than I can say, especially in the Doom engine where ceiling detail is reliant on the sector layout. In Quake for example you can put a few brushes up there and be done with it, but quite often in Doom it's easy to build a playable space then look up and see a huge blank canvas. Vast fields of repeating tiled flats are no good, so my advice would be to go into a larger area building from the ceiling down, as it were. It's much easier to build a playable space under the constraints of necessary ceiling details as opposed to adapting a lot of extra lines to a pre-existing area. It can be done of course, the more you build on larger grid settings the easier it is to cut it up with more lines later on.

 

That's essentially what you need to do, cut up the large sector into smaller parts that can have different heights and textures. Given the geometry or intended layout of the space you can add radial lines around the room to make it like an inverted crater, or you can divide the ceiling with weird angles and shapes to help direct the player's eye and general flow of the 3d space. As it's been said reference is always helpful, either similar maps you like or real-world architecture.

[Pegleg]

An additional suggestion that is more for ease of navigation on the automap than anything else: if you add a lot of detailing to the ceiling that doesn't correspond to any features on the floor, make the lines that define those sectors invisible so that they don't clutter the automap.

[Aurelius]

To add what @reflex17 was saying, if you happen to be mapping in UDMF (now or later), you can use sector portals to make a lot of varying ceiling and floor details without the hassle of having to make them overlap in the editor. If you google 'sector portals doom' you'll probably find many tutorials about the subject.

[galileo31dos01]

@rdwpa What is the first picture from? reminds me of Counterattack.

[Octillion]

4 hours ago, Pegleg said:

An additional suggestion that is more for ease of navigation on the automap than anything else

 

Good call, the automap was a chaotic drawing. Especially in the caverns section with all the vertex slopes.

 

1 hour ago, Aurelius said:

if you happen to be mapping in UDMF (now or later)

 

Yup, already on UDMF and a couple of portal sectors are planned.

 

Well, after careful consideration and some tinkering. I was able to establish a very decent looking ceiling. Although not entirely done, I am very pleased with how it looks so far. (Ignore the upper floor's crudeness, it's just a square sector till I finish the lower floor first.)

 

 

 

 

[baja blast rd.]

3 hours ago, galileo31dos01 said:

@rdwpa What is the first picture from? reminds me of Counterattack.

 

It's the opening area of Counterattack m01. 

 

In case anyone ends up wondering, the other shots are Slaughtermax m11 (tourniquet) and Vanguard m11.

[xvertigox]

@rdwpa Great explanation and fantastic shots - very useful. Bookmarked this thread for future reference.