Check out the link in the description to see Dell’s Inspiron 5675 line-up.
This is a range of PCs ideal for content creation thanks to the Ryzen processors powering them.
As well as being more secure, Ryzen also offers more cores than the competition, which makes
them a great choice for a user such as myself who does more than simply gaming.
Allow me to elaborate.
Mapping is one of my favourite hobbies.
One I got into long before there was any financial incentive to do so.
I loved it because it let me create my own world.
When it comes to 3 dimensional spaces, we humans are wired in a special way.
The moment I’m placed in a new environment, my brain starts mapping it out as though it’s
a real place.
I swear it’s the reason that flipping a map we’re familiar with feels so…
WRONG.
Why places we know well have a different feel from when we first visited them.
And how, even years after we’ve been somewhere, we can still fly around it in our minds long
after the other memories have dulled.
I could still probably make a map of my school.
But still haven’t.
By the end of this video, I hope to have shown you some of the methods I’ll use to make
my next map look good.
And perhaps it will inspire you to make something of your own.
Even if it doesn’t, hopefully you’ll find this entertaining and educational.
Within this Dell Inspiron is AMD’s Ryzen 1700X which, until late last year, was actually
TOO powerful and Valve had to update their engine before Ryzen could use all 16 threads
efficiently to compile maps.
It now can and it’s ridiculously fast at it which will result in increased productivity
whether you’re compiling a map or rendering a video.
The top of the line Inspiron also comes with watercooling to help keep it cool and quiet
even when you’re rendering your map for the 20th time.
Any way!
Time to get onto my mapping discoveries.
My last map, de_sparity, had a lovely shiny reflective translucent ice texture.
And it became one of the map’s best features!
It got me thinking: where has all the shininess gone?!
CS:GO can do it.
It just chooses not to.
Dust2’s makeover is the latest tragedy, with the tiled temple finally succumbing to
the dull, dusty nature.
The shiniest thing you’ll find now is this car window.
And that’s just sad.
This is the Lost Coast.
It’s a free level that failed to make it into Half Life 2’s coast section, so instead
Valve released it on its own at a later date to showcase HDR lighting.
But forget about that for a second and look at this cliff here.
Or the wet, sandy floor.
Now you try telling me that the ground in CS:GO looks better than this!
I ripped a load of the shiny textures from the Half Life 2 games and made this showcase
map.
Valve spoiled us with these textures.
You have this wet rocky texture from the Lost Coast.
You have this very wet, slimy sand texture from somewhere in Half Life 2.
There’s a lighter variant of it here!
It doesn’t have to be so in-your-face, either: this one looks rather dry, until you view
it from this angle and notice water between the raised sandy bits!
Think of the maps you could make with these.
This is the tiled floor from the old Dust2.
RIP.
These are cobbled streets straight from City 17 and Half Life 2 deathmatch!
Here’s a bit of the citadel!
And these are the old train station tiles from the very start of the game.
Even tiled roofs don’t have to be boring, as can be seen from these examples.
Now in CS:GO’s defense, there are some nice shiny textures.
These are the tiles from the castles of Cbble.
Nuke’s polished floors and painted walls also sport that subtle sheen.
Canals shows potential, featuring water AND shiny pavings.
But how is such a technology possible?!
CS:GO uses a cubemap- 6 pictures smooshed over the object.
It’s pretty basic, actually, all done before the map is even played.
The plus-side of this is that if used properly, the results can be still be effective while
keeping your framerates super high: something quite handy in a game like Global Offensive.
The downside of pre-calculating the reflections is that they sometimes show reflections from
the wrong locations, and you won’t ever be able to see somebody creeping up behind
you from your sniper scope.
By adding more I was able to improve the effect, but it greatly increases filesize and isn’t
that practical to do.
But it’s nice to show as an example of how you can fake good reflections if you know
what you’re doing.
The Inspiron is a bit more future-proof than that, a game like CS:GO posing no problem
for the modern Geforce 1060 graphics card powering it.
So let’s try something a little more challenging.
Here’s the Inspiron powering Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which supports all kinds of cutting
edge graphical effects including a modern-day cubemap-like effect known as Screen Space
Reflections.
Rather than being pre-planned images, these update in real-time to show what’s going
on.
This means that, finally, after all these years, we can now see reflections of wet floor
cones exactly where they should be!
Can it get much better than this.
LIGHT SURFACES Back to de_sparity again.
This is the map in an early stage.
I think it looks really nice!
But I found that the more detail I added, the darker the map got.
It was strange: it wasn’t because I had made the lighting darker (in fact had to brighten
it a few times to make it feel less dingy!)
Turns out, the colour of the surfaces matters.
A lot more than I first thought.
The older versions used white snow for the floor and light browns and greys for the walls.
I painted dark stones onto the snow and the walls were replaced with shadier textures
and I think that this made a big difference.
Not just to the surfaces in question, but to those around them as well.
You see, radiosity is kind of a thing.
Light shone onto a lightly coloured surface will bounce off it and bright others as well.
Take a look at this dark, depressing alley.
Even the SLIGHTEST change to the wall that’s lit up will brighten the rest of the scene
as well.
That’s the power of radiosity, guys!
Next we’ll paint the walls and floor that were in the shade white.
This doesn’t make much difference to the rest of the scene since there’s not a lot
of light bouncing off these bits in the shade any way.
But once again, here’s the difference that concrete bit on the other side of the alley
makes.
Lulululul.
Lu.
And lastly we’ll make the lit up areas white and suddenly this alley way is transformed
into somewhere that you’d actually want to walk down.
No change to anything other than the colour of the textures, but look at just how much
brighter it looks.
Pretty simple and obvious really, but still might be something that catches out as you
transition over to your final textures.
That’s why you paint your walls a bright colour, people!
I call this the Mirrors Edge Effect.
A real-life example of this would be the Getty Museum.
Just one sec.
let me get them off the SD card using this VERY CONVENIENT BUILT-IN CARD READER.
Yup, built in cardreader.
Right, The Getty Museum.
If you ever visit LA then I strongly recommend stopping by, and it’s free for all to see.
It contains numerous works of art within its buildings.
But for me, the place ITSELF was a masterpiece, containing everything needed to make a good
level: intricate pieces of architecture, pits, water, and- of course- sun.
Video really doesn’t do the place justice.
Everywhere I looked gave me inspiration for what could be my next map.
It felt designed to let in the maximum amount of sunlight, which was then bounced around
everywhere thanks to its light-coloured walls.
I even took a picture of a wall to turn into a texture, bringing a bit of the museum home
with me.
Before we move on, just one more thing- don’t forget about the sky.
While the sun’s busy shining wherever it can, the shaded parts rely on the rest of
the sky to illuminate them.
When mapping for Source, always ensure the ambient light is set to what the sky is or
it just looks… wrong.
You may think that blue is a cold colour, but it’s on the sunniest days that the shadows
will be bluest, making for a beautiful, natural blue-yellow colour-scheme.
SHADOWS I tore myself away from my PC – don’t
worry, just for a couple of hours- to get some inspiration from outside.
The lighting at this time of year is my favourite.
Winter is like a day-long sunset because it remains so low in the sky, appearing a more
golden colour than a summers day will be.
When I was on my walk, it happened to be at an interesting angle, as well!
I’ll try and explain it with this example, with this house representing the buildings
I saw on my walk.
Imagine that one of their walls is facing the sun almost directly head-on.
The opposite will therefore be in complete shadow.
One of the sides is only just in the shade, and the other barely in the sunlight, so there
are long shadows being cast by anything sticking out.
It’s this side that fascinates me, so I went and made an example wall in CS:GO to
see what it could look like.
Now maybe I got a little bit carried away- I just threw heaps of stuff at this wall to
see what would stick.
But you get the idea.
The shadow of a prop can help to decorate another part of the map, giving the illusion
of additional detail.
Well I guess it is sort of detail in itself.
Don’t be afraid of casting intricate shadows.
Wield them like an art brush on your maps and they’ll help to breathe life into otherwise
plain or boring surfaces.
It saddens me to see a well-balanced, well detailed level that’s then let down by the
lighting.
Far better to be lazy and to let your pc do the work for you.
And these are the things that I’ll be considering when it comes to detailing my next map.
Blue sky, light colours, long shadows… and hopefully lots of windows that you must jump
through to reach your objective.
I’d call it de_fenestration.
Thanks again to Dell for providing the hardware used to power and to make this video.
Its SSD and powerful Ryzen processor combo really makes mapping a lot faster and more
enjoyable than with a less powerful system.
Check out the Inspiron lineup in the video’s description.