merricksdad's blog

Finally got my new mouse. Ran out of money again, but still kicking. Also had a week of presentation construction and dispersion at work to take care of. Real life... haha

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Last week showed me where I was going wrong. Not too wrong, but still outside the realistic workload for the NWN engine. I had found that a single tile can only have approximately (or exactly) 10000 faces in the total mesh content attached to that aurorabase. That may seem like a large number, but just one of my higher poly rock sections was 9467 faces, and the single cave column I showed last week was over 12000 when fully assembled.

After considering some setbacks, it may be in my best interest to not use the automatic wall and roof builder I made. While it looks good, I seem to have failed to to account for what the area around walkable pathways would look like, and converting my math and fitting it to already constructed walkmeshes is not being pleasant.

After considering some setbacks, it may be in my best interest to not use the automatic wall and roof builder I made. While it looks good, I seem to have failed to to account for what the area around walkable pathways would look like, and converting my math and fitting it to already constructed walkmeshes is not being pleasant.

Further Examination

After examining the diablo 3 tilegroups, I realized that many of them might not work with my layout as 4x4 tiles, but would have to function as 8x8. But I don't want groups that large. That's an entire map and the scale would be off.

Everything in this tileset is big. The space is big. The polycount on static parts is big. The texture files. Just big.

As I mentioned last week, this week I'll be going over the basic tile layout I discussed before I went back to school full time. One ot the things I really enjoyed about Sword Coast Legends was the potential in the tilesets to be something amazing. Potential is about all it had though, and the dungeon builder never ended up having ease of use. A DM had to randomize the dungeon 100 times to get the layout they desired. But not all was lost...

Many Groups to Choose From

In this week's update I give you a look at some concept art I've been making at work in my free time. These are based on researched real caverns and features you can find in real places.

Now I just need to make a few more repeatable pieces that I like better than the ones I already have, work on the texture a bit, and make these come to life.

As promised, pics are available for some of my work so far. Not going to show the entire collection, or the tileset factory yet, but I'll show  you some of the library of parts, as well as some of the textures.

Word of my demise in the NWN community has been somewhat misleading. While I haven't been active in CCC challenges, I have been quietly watching from behind my books.

I've also been working heavily on the Middledark Tileset, and while I won't show any pictures today, I have made some substantial progress. Having last been on here talking about Sword Coast Legends, I got fairly deep into building arrays of placeables in a mid to high poly range. They're mostly for static use, but also for use as parts in a unity-engine way of constructing tilesets.