Hale-frickin'-lujah. I finally got the area lighting sorted for the farm. I forgot to delete the wonky olive green light, but I can do that later, next time I feel like waiting 2 hours for the area to render.
It was just a cruel tease. The lighting is still borked. I thought that importing Lothering's light rig would fix everything, and in the toolset, it looked as if it did, but nope!
(sigh) guess I'm going to have to keep at it. And spend more 2 hour intervals rendering the fricking level.
Now that you've seen the outside of the farm, I can talk about the "joys" of building some of the structures. Oddly enough, there are no barn models. There are a few agricultural implements in the toolset like shovels and pitchforks and things, but precious little else. So I had to make the barn and the tool shed from scratch from tiny component pieces. The tool shed, for example is two roof pieces, some scaffolding, two walkways turned on their sides, and a few planks. I had to position the hay bales inside and out and add a few rabbit hutches to patch the holes in the walkways.
Apparently, no one in the art department has actually been on a farm. I was going nuts because baled hay was not invented until motorized farm machinery was, and I wanted a proper haystack. When I looked at the things that were labeled "haystack," they were bales. Eventually, I said, "Screw this, let's just use the frickin' hay bale." That's when I discovered that the haystack I wanted was mislabeled as a hay bale.
*facepalm* Oh man. From the screens, though, everything looks amazing. 
Finally, FINALLY, I won my first skirmish in the World Lighting War! I changed the ambient light settings in hopes that it would lighten the shadows somewhat and make people look less like New York Deli Black-and-White cookies, and now they look like Dark Grey-and-White cookies. Hey, it's progress. I bumped up the intensity of the ambient settings and dropped the "glare" setting for the sunlight and I'm re-rendering the lightmap. Let's see how this goes.
Yet another false victory. Back to setting up 9 billion point lights all over the place and 2-hour renders. 
At last, I have something to post. It isn't done. The skydome doesn't match the ambient light (the skydome needs to change), and the characters are still way too dark, but I know how to fix that. The important thing is that the deep black shadows on both the characters and the placeables - doors and gates - all show, and more importantly, the placeable lighting matches the "bloom" or glare settings on the walls, even on harshly lit surfaces.
Now all I have to do is add more character lighting, change the skydome, and bump up the ambient light just a tad so the character ground shadows aren't quite so crisp.Hmm, looking at that screenshot, I may also need to move the sun. The ground shadows line up with the sunset sun in the sky, but they don't agree with the building lighting, and of the two, the building lighting is infinitely harder to fix.
In other words, progress! At last!
After a long and frustrating struggle, I finally found a thread that helped me fix the splotchy interior levels. It was promisingly entitled "Weird, time consuming but successful interior lighting solution." The "time consuming" part gave me hope. Modding is a time consuming, frustrating process, so a thread that included it in its title would at least be frank. It turns out that the fix was easier than it seemed.
That sounds complicated, but the truth is that it took 5 minutes. The author of that thread and I seem to have very different ideas about what constitutes "time consuming".
Here is the "before" shot. It may look familiar.
And here is the after shot. The overall brightness is higher, which is fine, but the black spots are gone! So are all of the characters, but when the area is included in the mod, the party who enters will be whoever the player selects, not necessarily the ones in that screenshot.
The first draft of the intro cutscene dialogue is up. Remember how Dragon Age Origins started, with a general intro that applied to everyone before delving into origin-specific cutscenes? It will look like that.
Ah, more fun with exterior areas.
Gives the impression that there's a waterfall right around the corner, doesn't it?
Except that when you get to the other side, you see that the background is showing. Oh, and the tree is floating on air.
More abnormally buoyant trees...
And hey! How about some floaty shrubs?
Well, at least I've figured out how to do lighting.
But I'm thinking that bridge was never meant to be out of the Deep Roads. It's crazy shiny. Maybe lowering the light probe would help.
Testing is a big part of level creation. You have to run a character over every square inch of the level to be sure that it can't walk off the edge of the world anywhere. Because if a character does walk over a drop, it can't walk back. Weeeellp, it looks like I found a gap. The good news is that the default leather armor model has pants, so I don't have to create a custom armor set for Beldin. 
Stone Bridge isn't finished yet, but it's within a day or two of being so, so I decided to return to Vintiver now that I've finally figured out how to do the lighting. Vintiver isn't finished yet, either - not by a long shot - but it's finally at a point where I can show a screenie or two without being embarrassed.
Here's the first shot, an exterior of the Arbor Inn. It has naked men! Well, kind of. Strategically placed gear, and all...
Hang on... it has naked men?! 
How drunk tired must Bartha have been to not notice that? No wonder she decided that it was a good place to stop 
You were the one who decided to call it an early night...
You were the one who decided to call it an early night...
But, but...
Got some more work done on Vintiver. I still have to dress the market, place more trees along the northern side, and paint some farm-like terrain along the southern side, but it's getting a lot closer to finished. One more day (and one more one-hour rendering session) should do it. Oh, and I also have to fix the lighting. Again. I need to double the intensity of the character lights. At least I think I do. The lightmapper crashed at 90%, so I'm not sure how much of this is a insufficient lighting and how much of it is toolset crash.
The Winery, complete with sucky lighting...
The view from the southern road. Note the cheesy treeline in the background. Those are placeable billboards, not trees. I'll stick a few real trees in front and it will look better.
The view from the northern road. The windmill turns!
Laundry day behind the Arbor Inn. That shadow is supposed to look like that. It's behind a hulking big building.
A really empty market. On my to-do list.
And of course, the Chantry. I'm pleased with the way this area turned out. You can't see the whole thing from the road, but there's a little garden and a parsonage off to one side.
Sorry, no nekkid guys this time. I'm pretty much out of memory at this point, so I figured it was probably a better idea to just take the screenshots and reboot.
Thanks! It still has a ways to go, but it's around 85% done at this point.
This is, by far, the biggest and most complicated level I've ever created. So far, it has around 22K individual models (building component pieces, fences, trees, grass, miscellaneous props). When it's done, it will probably have around 23K.
The only thing is that it's going to require Awakening, since I'm using some of the models from there, and at least one complete level.
This is a toolset view, not an in-game screenshot, but I'm ridiculously proud of this bookseller's stall, and I didn't feel like waiting the hour+ for this to render before posting.
To give you some idea how the model count gets so high, these are partial lists of the models and the vegetation.
It doesn't list every book, box, or bean, though, and some of the model names are kinda obscure (I would *never* have thought to look for "wall torch" as "ferelden" nor would I have guessed that I'd find "bookshelf" listed as "scroll" or or that "big, fancy chair" was actually "fercha"), but hey! Trial and error!
Hey if you're still looking for voice actors, my sister and her husband are interested. They're both amateur actors. My sister's husband is Irish and can pretty much do any British accent.
That would be awesome! We're still a long way away from there (Mahumia is the only one who has written any dialogue), but we'll get there eventually. Level creation is the most time-intensive part, and the biggest area, Vintiver, is almost done. I'm dressing the last two merchant booths now, and then it's rendering and it's done. (And then it's modifying the level for its night-time state, which shouldn't be as hard as the original level creation because the trees and buildings don't move.)
Well, the market is stocked and the lighting is fixed. All of the trees are added, and everything that's currently in position works. Which is not to say that it is perfect.
Although the cabbages are! Have you ever seen such mathematically straight lines? (Alright, it was laziness on my part: bulk copy/paste.)
And the lighting is fixed! Yay!
And the market is stocked!
And the bookstore looks nice in game... apart from the weird black shadows on the side of the scroll bookshelves.
It's insane, but I really want to go to an Octoberfest here.
They don't have a grapevine model, but they do have brambles, and it looks more or less the same... from a distance.
I wonder why they decided to make the roofs walkable...
And here he is again, walking under the exact same roof. I could "fix" this and put barrels or something across the opening, but I think I'll put loot under here instead.
But it wasn't all fun and games.
But there's more...
(sigh)
Also, I had to adjust the ground height here for some reason, and I forgot to check the clearances. Apparently, this is too big a step to walk over, so I have to raise the ground again. And I got careless with the camera angle. I don't know if hips are illegal or not, but I didn't want to take the chance so I blurred the heck out of it.
Streaking in the chantry, Beldin? You won't earn any points with the Maker that way!
The Lothering chantry was fine, but some things didn't make sense. The templars are supposed to live there, but what do they do? Sleep on the floor? I gave them sleeping quarters. Also, forgetting that I gave Sister Arda her own parsonage, I built quarters for her inside the chantry as well. Maybe some other family lives in the parsonage?
OK, now I don't feel so bad about the shadows. They're in the base game, too, even if I never noticed them.
The chantry interior is a modified version of the Lothering chantry, with a few changes to reflect the fact that the village is not expecting darkspawn. One of the things I didn't change was this ladder. In another area, I needed a ladder tall enough to reach the roof, but the ladder in the toolset was too short, so I pieced two together and hoped no one would notice. It's gratifying to know that the BioWare level artists did the same thing.
Of course, there are times when the door doesn't fit right, and it's supposed to be like that, as with this slums house.
Items don't stack neatly. Each of those platters and those bowls has to be positioned individually. Also, I never noticed it before, but the fur pile looks more like a pile of oddly plump hides. With feet. Ew.
To end on a more positive note, I think I've finally gotten the streaking thing out of my system and have grown bored with it.
And the screen shots are pretty much done, at least until we reach the area in the game. I only posted these because you've seen Vintiver before.
Just don't ask me to do any VO, unless you want a character with a strange European accent who pretends to have a Fereldan accent
And I really really love the look of Vintiver! You're doing such an amazing job with it
Actually, I was going to ask you if I could voice Bartha. I've got a fairly deep voice with a fairly generic American accent.
And thanks!
Vintiver exterior is done, complete with merchants, shoppers, children playing in the square, a pair of lovers sitting under a tree, and all the ambient squirrels, dogs, and cats a village should have. Which means that it's time to do the same for the inn, and then move on to the intro cutscene.
Retour en haut
