A massive, open world for you to tear up, explore, and crash in. This thread is meant to be for documenting my workflow, techniques, and any other items I believe might be useful to others. This map is meant to be a giant amalgamation of my "style" of maps. That means tons of stunts, dirt tracks, Mad Max-isms, MotorStorm-ology, pop culture references, and all around ridiculousness. Think Burnout: Paradise somewhere in the desert. The world is divided into camps, that's where all the action is. First things first. Terrain.party for finding some cool heightmaps. Unfortunately, the site is somewhat broken as of right now. For this map, I chose Purnululu National Park in Australia. Pretty neat looking place, but I'm only using it as a heightmap - I'm not just remaking it in Beam. After loading my selection into L3DT for further refining, I got this (which will then be imported into Beam) ...and loading the heightmap into Beam (also raising the max height a bit, because if its worth doing its worth overdoing. TEXTURES: I like making my own textures, but I don't have any professional software (besides normal Graphic Design stuff) so I'm using some free software and websites. IMGOnline Seamless Texture Maker is one of the main ones I use. Its a tad rudimentary, but it gets the job done. I also use GIMP 2.8.16 with GIMP 2.8's DDS Plugin, for you know, editing DDS files. From this point forward, I'll be documenting changes/additions to this map until its finally released (which will be a while from now - this is an 8k map that will be fully detailed.) The Starting Camp The starting area is the first thing the player will see upon spawning into the map. It should really establish the overall aesthetic of the map and should be where you focus a lot of your designing. For this map, I want the player to emerge from a small, confined space into this wide open environment. I want the idea of this map to literally smack the player in the face when they first "escape" their shed. So, there's a sketchy, wooden ramp within the first 100 feet. Tires, scrap piles, excavators, and wood planks litter the ground nearby. And a current flyover of the entire map, 100% unfinished. (2/4/19)
Yay. Another map to make my computer explode! Can't wait for this map either way. Looks great so far.
Quick little peak into how the camps are marked. The default "smoke" particle barely reaches 20 feet, so I chose to use the "dust" particle instead. It stands out more, too. Because of the scale of this map, the player will often have to travel from camp to camp. That means trailblazing through the wilderness because trails will be few and far between. In order for the players to not have to blindly roam the world, each major camp has a smoldering campfire with a cloud of smoke rising into the sky. There'll be innumerable smaller camps, but the player will have to discover those for themselves.
Rockface Runs are a bunch of point-to-point circuits that take place, literally, on the rockface of the various canyon walls. Punishment for losing control is careening over the cliffside.
Oh man You used hot air balloons!! That's something I've been waiting to get to modeling for mine! This map seems great, so much progress!!
I've never really downloaded user maps - back in 2013/14 I did - so I have no idea what people have and haven't done, but now that I've discovered this section of the forums I'm seeing so much! (If you hit FORUMS it only shows 5, if you hit forums again it shows them all! I didn't realize that for ages) And thanks that's real kind!
Thanks to @Nadeox1 's old tutorial, I managed to make my first static blender object It's wonky, ugly, and the collisions are all kinds of borked but its mine and I love it nonetheless. (cries from lack of understanding)
Hahah nice!! That's such a great feeling, so freeing to make your own things! Then comes uv's, and collision, and never ending, "Now I can make THIS TOO!" ... bitter sweet =D
My god this reminds me of Canyon of Speed. I felt a little tug on the heart strings at your mention of your first Blender static object. I felt exactly the same way on my first working Blender creation. Thank you for sharing your workflow!
Just some random exploration Was mainly working on decals, although most of today was spent working on my actual drawings
Running into some... issues with the 8K size of the map. Scaled it back to 4096...ish. Rebuilt the entire map. Fun day.
Some preliminary testing of a dirt airstrip. I never claimed to be a good pilot You can see towards the end where the mountain range gets cut off where I sliced the heightmap.
So the other day I was shocked that you had hot air balloons, but you also just posted your first blender object, so are those not your balloons/wind mills? Because they're two things I've wanted in my map since playing Forza Horizon (balloons) and that long water bridge map in Beam from years ago with those wind mills. BASICALLY I hate seeing other people's maps because then I feel like I'm copying/stealing their ideas but I'm not I sweeear =D Also, nailed the landing! =D Makes me think the game needs a POD RACER mod!
Honestly, I don't know where the balloons came from. I feel like I got them from a public domain site a long time ago for a school project. Might be wrong, its been a long time, since that model (and a bunch of other really crappy looking trees) where transferred over from my old laptop. I will say, if you make your own you're also able to make a variety of skins for it too. I'm actually making my own in blender for that reason, and because the model is actually quite broken (the coordinates are like a hundred blocks from where the "origin" of the object is. They'll be far above the map, so collisions won't be anything I have to worry about. lol The windmills are a stock Beam asset though. They come in pieces in the ETK map.
Wow I didn't realize they were there until . . well now I remember seeing them haha!! Awesome, that'll save some time for sure. As for the balloons, that's funny man, especially with their wonky point of origin, very frustrating to deal with I'm sure! =D Thanks for the info man!
That was actually very easy. Tons of tutorials on how to make HABs on YouTube. Just a bunch of spheres, cut into rings and connected. It came out a little bit long vertically but that's okay. I'd say I got it pretty darn close to the old rainbow one, and this one doesn't have borked coordinates However, mine has this god-ugly shading effect... It looks so 1995. Is there a way to fix this, if anyone knows?
That's a result of NORMALS on the vertices being "hard" try to find a way to "soften edge" or "set normal to soft" =)
