Hello everyone, and welcome to the 2023 Abyss Asset Showcase!
Some of the questions we get the most often are “Is the mod dead?”, followed by “Can you please get out of my house?” and “Can't you just let me go?”, and our answer is always the same: No. Abyss is very much alive!
Jokes aside, whenever we tell people that there's a lot of things happening behind the scenes we always wish we could explain exactly just how much we really mean. Today we're very excited to show you some of the work we've been putting into the assets throughout the game, with over 40 custom models and materials made in just the last year alone.
“After the journey you've had, a fresh can of patented Aperture-brand Water* sounds great right about now.”
“The reader chimes as you swipe the card through it, unlocking the door with an echoing click.”
“It's just nice to have someone to talk to for a change.”
"The hook of the crane sways as the facility shudders."
"The alarm blares through the tunnel, the door rolling closed with a resounding thud."
As a Portal 2 mod, Abyss relies heavily on some of those original Valve assets that gave Aperture the look and feel we've all come to love. But being over 12 years old now, some of those assets are beginning to show their age. We've taken the time to breathe some new life into these assets not only to improve how the game looks, but also to immerse you as the player into the story and give Abyss a unique visual identity.
"Miles and miles of these pipes carry their contents to every unseen corner of the facility."
Abyss runs on Portal 2: Community Edition (P2:CE), and one of the main benefits of this for us has been the support for PBR shading. PBR - or Physically Based Rendering - isn't a new thing in the gaming scene, but it isn't a technology natively supported by the Source engine. We found that in many cases the models themselves had sufficient detail, and even just retexturing them with a PBR material was enough to bring these assets up to date.
Abyss is so old now (over 10 years!) that we've even begun remastering some of our own assets! Here we've touched up the iconic Aperture Science logo hung over the first enrichment sphere in Avernus 02, seen right before the player enters the first testing track of the game.
But models aren't the only assets we've been working on - world textures are also getting a noticeable upgrade, bumping up their resolution and getting the same PBR treatment we've given to the models. Many of these textures didn't even have a normal map beforehand, and the difference is staggering when compared to the originals. P2:CE's PBR implementation also supports parallax occlusion mapping, allowing us to give depth to otherwise flat materials.
We hope you've enjoyed this early Christmas present, and getting a glimpse into all the work we've been putting in behind the scenes. But there's much more to do, and we're always looking for more talent to help us out! If you'd be interested in joining the Abyss team, please consider submitting an application here. To stay updated, follow us on Twitter and join our Discord.
Thank you all for reading, and we'll hopefully see you with another big update soon!
I love you guys, keep this up
Thank you! 😁
The 3D bricks are amazing! How did you do that?
I mentioned it in the article - parallax! P2:CE's PBR implementation includes support for parallax occlusion mapping, so we've been using it on textures like the bricks to give them fake depth. There's no actual extra geometry, you're still looking at a 2D plane.
lol technology from 30 years ago. almost every game has "3d" bricks like that using parallax mapping and normal map
We never claimed otherwise. Like we said about PBR in our article, it's just tech that isn't native to Source and has only now become more widely available through projects like P2:CE; it might not be new in the industry but we're still excited to use it!
Amazing showcase Distanced, looks like you and the team have been working hard! Love the gel pipes of course, but I think my fave model shown here is the crane arm, excellent colour choice. Those PBR-ified models look fantastic too, and I'm very intrigued by the snippets of dialogue/script below each image, great addition.
Merry Christmas Team Abyss, looking forward to seeing more!
This means so much coming from you Demon, glad you liked it!
Le epique
It's great, but has nothing related to Half-Life 1...
Ohhh my god this looks SO GOOOOOOD!! I absolutely love it.
I really hope some of those remastered epic looking models are gonna be accessible for mappers to use. Some of these look so so so good.