Let Your Creativity Soar

You realize that a lot of "new" content that gets released in this game uses the same assets and techniques for specifically for the same reasons I stated, right? All those helmets, weapons, buildings, vehicles, shaders, effects, flora, rocks, mountains, terrain, explosions, and much more use the same referenced textures and shaders. For example, the composite helmet and the maniac helmet use the same shader. The large and small rocks on Indar use the same shaders. Every faction has just one shader for their weapons and armor.

This describes what I'm talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_atlas

It's an industry standard practice. Working with this limitation makes the content you create much, much more viable for implementation than say something you create from scratch using 3rd-party textures and shaders. It's also a lot more difficult than you'd imagine.

Let's say we're making a forest. The developers have set it up so that each piece of flora uses the same shader, texture, etc. The difference between each of the meshes is their polygon mesh, vertex color (we use this to animate the forest. I'm not going to get into this, but this is how a lot of games animate flora, including this one). Let's say we make our own tree with its own set of textures and shaders. What if the shader we created doesn't fit the specification of the engine that the rest do? What if our shader isn't as optimized as the developers need it to be? What if the texture uses too much memory? You'll have to spend time remaking the textures, shader, or in some cases having to remap or retopologize your mesh, which could take LOTS of time. And even if you do manage to optimize it, there's still a performance hit from an object not instancing a shader/texture that's already loaded in memory. Developing around the limitation that I described, you have to take the meshes you create and then UV map it based on an already created texture.

I think the best analogy I could come up with is like creating a new book using only the individual words found in another.

 

It is dead easy for anyone with a 3d modeling package to mash together models they didn't make, and it is intellectually dishonest to even try to suggest otherwise.

I'm not even going to address the rest of your post, because I have been doing modeling and level design the last 6 years, and already have an extensive understanding of the development side of most games. I know full well how environments and objects are made, and mashing together models that weren't meant to be put together is not how it's done.

 

I'm not taking credit for any of the hard worth the original artists have put into creating each and every single object within the game. I'm just placing them in a way I found interesting. I think it's very clear that these are mostly the original models found in the game.

I didn't create the chess pieces, I simply placed them on the board. For fun.

I'm not going to agree or disagree with you, but that seems to be the pattern the development team has been taking with a large number of their assets and building layouts.

 

Yeah, and that's fine, they did look neat, but the way you put certain objects together just wouldn't be viable in an actual game, and it's not nearly as cool as making new ps2 style environment art from scratch.

A lot of the pieces in the game are made out of modular level pieces (landing pads, wall segments, etc) which are put together to form different objects and buildings, so you're kinda on to how it's done, they're still taking modular assets and putting them together to build things, but they're not putting full completed buildings together to make bigger buildings.

 

The first 2 pictures, there is a name for the technique you applied to render like this?

 

It's called an Ambient Occlusion pass

 

It is very beautiful this technique to make cg art.
I like more when it is rendered almost in pure white.
Could you render it using more white?
Lets see how pretty it gets :P

 

For the record, I meant the absurd turn things sideways throw them together make tower thing you were doing, not using modular pieces the way they were meant to be put together :]

Though you already knew that since I literally just said it in a previous post~~~