Post your Doom picture! [post in Part 2 instead]

[Tristan]

The reason my skyboxes are "barely beginner level" is most likely because I am a beginner with Terragen. I don't like having my work referred to as "no effort," when that's not the case. That's just disgusting. If I was only going to put minimum effort into this project then the whole thing would be limit-removing, and I'd be showing this as the start of MAP01, rather than what I have.

It doesn't help that I'm not entirely sure what's wrong with what I have already. I know that even Terragen Classic can create better things, but my intention is to have fairly bright grey mountains, half-frozen lakes, and a lack of atmosphere. I can see all three of these things in the two skyboxes so far, I think they look kinda cool, and I don't have a problem with it, but if it can be better then obviously, I'm going to try and make it so.

In any case, the presence of actual stuff in the sky makes 129thVisplanes sky better than mine. I'll make some sprites soon for ET's sky to address this.

[129thVisplane]

Antroid said:

Wow, you guys probably never saw terragen in your lives.

I never heard of it before this thread, yes.

[Antroid]

Eris Falling said:

~~ and a lack of atmosphere.~~

Well you achieved that pretty succesfully :P What's wrong with your current skyboxes is that a) the terrain has a stupid unrealistic shape, mostly produced by either the default generator or crude sculpting. No geological features are ever that shape, and it doesn't look like anything. PLUS, again, anyone who's seen even a glimpse of Terragen is going to recognize that as the pretty much default look of a terrain done in it, with little to no tweaks; and b) it has no color variation whatsoever. Even if they're "grey" they should not just look plain untextured. For a quick reference of what I'm talking about, just look at my quick examples. They have a bit of color variation, and on the still mostly untextured mountains the shapes are at least good enough to hide their monotony.

And, well, if you can't see the huge gap in realism and overall pleasantness to the eye between your skybox and mine, I don't really know what to say. I'm not boasting here, because I myself don't have all that much experience with Terragen, and whatever nice looking picture it produced was an achievement of it's programmers and not mine. But you've got to have a critical eye, and your landscape just doesn't cut it. If you don't like the "no effort" expression, I can always change it to "no skill" but I thought that would've been even more disgusting, no? Even if terragen's default settings produce something that fits a description of what you want, it doesn't mean you should just go for it. It's like needing a white (overcast, for example) sky like the first sky of Plutonia, opening up Paint, seeing that the new image file is already all white, saving that immidiately and proceeding to use as a sky.

129thVisplane said:

I never heard of it before this thread, yes.

Well that explains it. To understand how that looks to me, imagine someone making a whole map out of STARTAN2, FLOOR0_1 and CEIL1_1 (DB2's default textures), with maybe a room of BROWN1, posting it and then everybody saying that it's really good texturing.

[Da Werecat]

Eris Falling said:

That's just disgusting.

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1186141

[durian]

I should preface this by saying that this is not actually the sort of thing that I tend to like, but I experimented with some pipes.



I can't think of any instance in which I've seen sector-based pipes that I thought looked nice, but I wanted to try to do something about how flat PIPE2 looked when set alongside these protruding lights. So, I stuck two, evenly spaced, pipes in between each light, not really expecting to like it, since - like I said - this isn't the sort of thing that I tend to like. But it turned out okay - the nicest thing, which you can't see in a picture, is that it gives PIPE2 a much more 3D feel as you move past it.

[Koko Ricky]

Very cool and very subtle.

[Katamori]

Da Werecat said:

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1186141

Haha, our discussion have made slogens it seems :D so this is the feel of influencing a community? :D

Anyway, durian: awesome, I've never thought of it. You reinvented the whe...pipe!

[Tristan]

I had to slip a "that's just disgusting" reference in there somewhere, the opportunity was too good to miss.
A "no skill" instead would probably have seemed more "disgusting," but undoubtedly more correct than "no effort."

No geological features are ever that shape

Something that looks unrealistic in an Earth setting would be the norm somewhere else. Since the shape of Eris' surface is completely unknown, who's to say it doesn't look like what I've come up with?
Any attempt I have at sculpting the terrain over what the generator gives me usually botches up at some point. To me they don't look unrealistic at all, they're what I expect a (supposedly) uninhabited world to look like*
Any sculpting that I dare to do is more likely to be reducing heights, rather than adding them.
In fairness, after looking at yours a few more times, I can see what you mean about the colouring.
I started experimenting by using 2 extra colour layers with varying height parameters. I'm using something like 404040 for the main rock, 808080 for the second colour, and ACACAC for the third. It seemed to be turning out okay until Terragen bombed out. I'll upload something with that combination later.
It might contradict my objections to "no effort," but if the default terrain ends up looking good with some small edits here and there and the extra colouring, then I'll use that.

*On that note, I'm using a Terragen render as my wallpaper at the moment. OK, it's nothing amazing, and the terrain really is unrealistic. In fact, it just looks ridiculous, but I like how it turned out, and it does have a very alien feel to it, which is how it was supposed to be; fuck reality.

[mrthejoshmon]

The funny thing is that the "no skill" skyboxes Eris is producing are about x100 better thany ANY custom graphic I have EVER made with the extra point that I could never make anything like that myself (I like those skyboxes by the way, very alien and mysterious, they remind me of the PSX Spyro skyboxes, I realy liked the PSX Spyro skybox graphics and wish I could make such wonderful and unique skies too).

[Shadow Hog]

Weren't the Spyro skyboxes just vertex-colored polygons arranged such as to create extremely blurry background scenery?

[Obsidian]

Shadow Hog said:

Weren't the Spyro skyboxes just vertex-colored polygons arranged such as to create extremely blurry background scenery?

Dammit, now I want to play Spyro again!

[Platinum Shell]

Spyro fucking rocked. 1,2 and 3 did anyway. I haven't played the newer stuff.

[Shadow Hog]

Platinum Shell said:

Spyro fucking rocked. 1,2 and 3 did anyway. I haven't played the newer stuff.

Amen. I heard Enter the Dragonfly was pretty terrible, but didn't really play it much myself to confirm - and once it started becoming Legend of Spyro, they'd long since lost me.

[Obsidian]

I remember Enter the Dragonfly being quite laggy, which shouldn't really happen with a Playstation 2 game in my opinion. A Hero's Tail was pretty good though. Now, shall we steer this back to something more Doom-oriented? ;-)

[Platinum Shell]

Just since you asked, no. Provide something!







Never payed attention to the fact that the switch has a little ledge. I always go right next to a switch before I press it so I noticed after about my hundredth time through industrial zone.

[LigH]

schwerpunk said:

@ 129thVisplane: I'm getting a bit of a Duke vibe from your screenshots. In the good way, I mean.

LigH agrees.

[Antroid]

Eris Falling said:

Something that looks unrealistic in an Earth setting would be the norm somewhere else. Since the shape of Eris' surface is completely unknown, who's to say it doesn't look like what I've come up with?
Any attempt I have at sculpting the terrain over what the generator gives me usually botches up at some point. To me they don't look unrealistic at all, they're what I expect a (supposedly) uninhabited world to look like~~

Well, any sort of topology has to come about in some way or another. It's either seismic activity, like what my renders look like, or bombardment by meteors and the like, or water washing some ground away, or whatever. Even on the most alien and faraway planet the rules are still the same. The default terragen landscapes look, if anything, kinda remotely like the result of the last process I mentioned, massive floods or something, but that doesn't mesh with an otherwise featureless grey landscape. And it's not something you came up with, it's what terragen uses as the default parameters :P

If they don't look unrealistic to you, I assume you haven't given it much thought then? Or you just don't have a discerning eye for terragen pictures yet as someone who's extremely new to it. I mean, the rendering style is always kinda realistic in terragen, which may be fooling you here, but the shape and coloring of the default terrain are terrible. They only look good to people who are impressed by terragen's rendering technology after their first exposures to it. If you want your skybox to look like shit to anyone who saw more then a passing glimpse of terragen, be my guest I guess?

[Obsidian]

Because Platinum Shell asked me so nicely:

From the map I submitted to the Mad Megawad Project. Crazy, innit?

[LigH]

Well ... uuhm ... not tooo ... uuhm ... unusual?

[Gez]

durian said:

I'm not sure I entirely understand, but I adjusted the resolution in GZDOOM - with which I took the screenshots, but do not ordinarily use on this laptop - from 1366x768 (the highest resolution for this laptop) to 1280x720, and they turned out fine, so I guess it was something to do with that.

Are you using an old version of GZDoom? Because it's a problem I fixed forever ago.

Antroid said:

Actually when you do a skybox properly in terragen it is fit exactly for a box, and not a round shape of any sort. That would make it look worse. All he has to do is select the skybox and rotate it some arbitrary amount. With a pitch black sky it won't make a difference for the top texture.

There are other ways to deal with fake contrast!

[durian]

Gez said:

Are you using an old version of GZDoom? Because it's a problem I fixed forever ago.

Must have been! I'm not using my regular laptop at the moment, and the DOOM folder on this one hasn't been properly updated in while. But I updated GZDoom yesterday, since I noticed the version I had was missing the 'DOOM' sector light mode, and so just tested screenshots again and they turned out fine :)

[Tristan]

And as I go to save the image, Terragen crashes yet again, losing another hour or so of work.

In the meantime, here's the brightness work. Eris is on the left.
http://www.eso.org/public/archives/images/medium/eso1142c.jpg

[Antroid]

You better have that huge-ass planet thing looming over us at the top of the skybox! It's too good an opportunity to miss, methinks.

[LigH]

That may be easier with LunarCell.

[Tristan]

Thanks LigH, I had wondered how I would draw it.

@Antroid: It's been planned for the sky since that shitty drawing I did of MAP02 to get an idea of how ET might end up looking. With that though, I may end up really scrapping realism, since that moon is actually tiny in Eris' sky, and I always imagined the reverse to look somewhat like the SKY2 being used in TNT 2. Unfortunately, my workings have suggested this will be far from the case. Perhaps the opening of the portal to the Discordant Realm* shifted the two bodies together or something.

I plan to have Dysnomia looming over the entrance to the base, regarding it's position in the first map. It will be in various different places throughout the game though.

*Not Hell.

[Antroid]

Eris Falling said:

*Not Hell.

Stop unknowingly stealing my ideas!

Also, some other utilities on that site with the lunarcell are hilarious. Separate software for essentially applying specific singular photoshop filters/effects, without all the control and customization? Shut up and take my money!

[Fletcher`]

Antroid said:

Well that explains it. To understand how that looks to me, imagine someone making a whole map out of STARTAN2, FLOOR0_1 and CEIL1_1 (DB2's default textures), with maybe a room of BROWN1, posting it and then everybody saying that it's really good texturing.

I might take you up on that.

[mrthejoshmon]

I believe this to be some kind of hidden mansion:

With red rugs:

and bookcase maze:

[Tristan]

LunarCell FAQ said
Can it draw gas giants like Jupiter?

No.

So that's why Neptune doesn't appear in the ToP skybox!
Seriously though, I'm glad both worlds are rock/ice based. I'll play around with this for a bit, I'm too pissed off with Terragen at the moment. I'm doing those renders on GL-PC next time.

EDIT: And LunarCell isn't GIMP compatible :'(

[Jayextee]

Episode 2 shit for Nex Credo. Attempting something that is neither gothic, rocky nor tech base is SO out of my comfort zone. This is me: