Hey everybody I've gotten some questions regarding level design and working with CryEngine. I am the lead level designer for the Petrograd mod, so I thought I would post this to let everybody see some of the work I do for the Petrograd mod.
For this first post, I'm going to talk about how I design environments - for this example I will do a quick and simple design of a city street.
First I start off by painting the textures - my vision for this street is a small boulevard with a landscaped median in the middle of it. So I'm going to paint textures for the street and the median.
Next I want to add some brushes to the environment - so I'll add some apartment buildings, a sidewalk and curb, some utility boxes and a small bus stop.
Now I want to add a few entities (which are objects with physics properties and such) - so I place them into the environment. I add some light poles and some phone booths.
So now we have a pretty decent environment, a few good brushes anyway. But it looks pretty barren. So, what am I to do? I know - I'll add some vegetation. First, I put a few big trees in.
Looks better - but it could still use some more detail I think - so I add a few small shrubs to round it out.
Ok - so now I have the vegetation out of the way. Looking at my progress so far - it looks good, but I still have work to do. At this point, I start to focus on the small details. A very easy way to add detail to environments is by using decals. So I put some decals on the street to make it look more like a street. Some patches to the pavement, a manhole, and a storm drain.
I put some street lights in earlier - but I felt that they were missing something - so I add some powerlines to connect them.
And with that - I'm done with the building of my simple street environment. Here is a screenshot of my progress so far:
It looks fairly decent...but I decide that I want to have this particular environment be part of a night-time level. So I change the time of day settings to night-time.
Only problem is - there aren't any lights lol! So I add some lights.
And with that, I'm basically done with this simple environment. Now I need to export this to the engine so that it will be playable in-game. I always like to see how things look in different modes - so I render the environment in wireframe mode and sketch mode before I export to the engine.
Everything looks good to me - so I go ahead and export to the engine. The final render looks like this:
And so there you have it. Well, this is the end of my first post. I've never done a blog like this before so I'm eager to see how you guys respond. If the response is positive I will probably do another post in the future. I hope you enjoy and learn something from this!
-Benjamin Thatcher (ben72227)
I think you have done a pretty good job at it, would suggest having a link to the full size image so we can see what you are doing and see the greater detail.. but other than that, a nice straight forward, clear tutorial... The Cry2 Engine certainly makes things a lot simpler than other editors and gives a beautiful result (in the right hands that is.)
Nice!Really good :D
CaptainSource, I added links to the full-sized images.
It's simpler... with practice.
Although the workflow is devilishly simple the toolset isn't very intuitive. Try adding a layer, for example.
I might have to buy Crysis, it has an awesome level editor.
only downside i see to this map editor... from this tutorial anyway.. is that it looks like i need to learn how to create moddels of my own before i can input my own content into the game?
great tutorial. may have to get the editor.
stonecold23 - not necessarily. There are a lot of building pieces within the Crysis asset files - for example, the bus stop was built completely out of Crysis assets. The only custom models I used in this scene were the apartment buildings.
Awsome stuff :D looks cewl
I can see why this workflow makes interiors difficult on this engine.
Interiors aren't necessarily that difficult - they are just done a bit differently that outdoor environments. With interiors you have to worry more about lighting and vis-areas (which are used to define indoor areas that have their own ambient color; vis-areas prevent the outside light from affecting 'indoor' environments)
wow
very nice done man!
but does someone know why the editor won´t open on my pc
(downloaded sandbox with the demo but doesn´t work at all)
awesome dude! can u plz post one next time on how to get custom songs on to crysis i dont know how to make my mp2 into mp3's
could you make a video tutorial
I thing is a better way to learn abou LEVEL DESIGN
That actually looks a lot like a russian city. I went to Leningrad and it looked exactly like that LOL
Nice work...
All Photos Dead!