Week 5

Hey guys, once you've made your posts for the week 5 task, add a comment to this post with links to those blog posts. Just make one comment each that has several links, one link per post you've made for this week. Because so few students posted their links to my blog last week, this week I will only be giving feedback to students who have posted this week's links on this blog post.

In case anyone's unsure, this week's task requirements can be found here.

For a checklist of what to have up on your blogs:

1) Evidence you used decals (screenshots)
2) Evidence you used brushes (screenshots)
3) Evidence you used entities (screenshots)
4) Evidence you used vegetation (screenshots - and I'm meaning covering "blank" areas of your island with this stuff, so I can't go into your island and look on to a huge, empty area with a repeating texture)
5) Letter + number combination on 5 scales, designed such that the island is shaped to control and manipulate viewer's experience to conceal and reveal the letter + number on those 5 different scales (screenshots and text explanations below, explaining your strategy for concealing and revealing the 5 different scales of the letter + number combination... so for each scale, one screenshot + some text explaining how you conceal and reveal your letter + number at that scale)
6) EXP1 draft completed (During class, I'll be getting you guys to look at EXP1 marking schedule and fill it out based on your work so far. This should help you see what you need to work on in preparation for the submission in week 8.)

In addition to this, from my in-class demos, you guys should all now know how to paint terrain textures only on slopes of certain angles, and ground at certain heights. As I said during the tutorial, I want you to use this to vary your terrain textures in a natural way. For example, painting snow caps high up on mountains, making steep cliffs look rocky, or making flat beaches sandy.

Also, don't forget the same controls can be applied to brushes added as vegetation. So you can make trees only grow on ground that's not too steep, thus automatically leaving cliff faces and beaches bare of vegetation.

Keep in mind that through all this, your primary goal is to come up with something that looks awesome. With very little effort, the Sandbox Editor can make beautiful 3D environments. To improve the realism of models you bring in to your environment, try using displacement maps and normal maps. As part of the work towards this submission, you should make models yourself, and texture them yourself, since this is what you'll be doing in the field once you graduate. Feel free to use existing 3D models on the internet, but chances are they're either poorly modelled or poorly texture mapped (meaning they might not look realistic when imported into Crysis). The best option is to make your own.