BM_inertmatter a series of campaign maps

feel free to tell me what you think give criticism or show me your pog collection

Personally, I think they look great!
The only major issues I have are that the color of the sky doesn’t look real at all and the color of the light on the floor of the last image is way too blue.
Other than that, great job!

Ok that’s hawt.

Impressive! The office areas overall extremely nice, and while the HEV suit room looks a little bare the others have a good mix of props and level geometry. I would suggest replacing the doors in images 2 and 5 with either solid brown ones or the red or grey fire doors, as both are used to the exclusion of the narrow-window type in Office Complex.

Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.

I don’t have a pog collection, but this looks promising - keep us updated!

reduced HDR and remembered to enable skybox fog

How do the doors retract?

they dont, the door to the parking lot is at the maps border i was hoping they would read as rotating doors or something but ill look into alternatives


I settled on creating a more appropriate door from brushes and some door knober model boys

One thing I find a little odd about this area is that it’s extremely gray, and the walls are made almost entirely out of that same labcrete texture. Possibly mix it up a little with the lighter concrete and maybe some of the other Lambda, Anomalous Materials, or Questionable Ethics textures on some parts of the flatter walls?

Overall, though, the sheer level of detail in the brushwork is just incredible.

do you think the “grey” issue is merely a low level of detail problem the vernacular just makes me think there might also be a lighting issue i can never tell how much saturation of color is enough but i do agree that the walls are blatantly comprised of the same texture

I was referring to the fact that there are two “labcrete” textures, one darker and one lighter. Black Mesa typically makes beams and structural elements out of the darker one while large wall surfaces are the lighter, although in this case since both are just shades of gray it wouldn’t really help with the lack of color issue.

The lighting, though, actually looks extremely good and I’d very much like to see how you did it in a little more detail.

i dont think theres anything very technically impressive about what i did i feel like i often end up throwing an absurd amount of light and light_spot entitys at a wall until it negates my inability to understand sources old timey ways of rendering
. i do constantly draw on my knowledge of light shadow and color as i understand them from techniques in representational art mostly painting. heres what it looks like in hammer
i often find what looks best doesnt make allot of sense in hammer


i i were a more determined person i would probably try to get a more visible core shadow on that pillar

most of the principles i find useful are explained in great detail in the book, color and light by james gurney. also looking into the sun with HDR on helps

That is extremely well explained. Considering you have so much grey and so much warm lights, maybe go for yellow/orange lines or highlights for the walls? Even just the navigational lines would do the trick.

Why are these props blinking?

Z-fighting perhaps? Or it might be some of the weird behavior that I’ve found when you make glass a world brush.

Have you tried tying the window to a func_detail? That might help if you haven’t done so already.

confirmed funkdetail and checked for z fighting good guess though

It might be some internal z-fighting on the the LOD submodel those props are using. I can’t quite tell from the screenshot, but those are monitors, right? Try replacing them with another monitor model and see if it still happens.

Also just for reference jadebenn, while it’s good practice to func_detail brushes using translucent and alpha masked materials, I’m fairly certain the compile tools do that automatically.

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.