- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Hmm, the screenshot looks interesting; almost like a "convolution kernel", which is an effect in Sony Vegas NLE post-production software. Bungie's doing a great job with Halo 3. Hopefully the player clipping geometry will have less or no anomalies this time around; level designers being on strict and tedious schedules might forget to enclose some of those triangles. Wait, that would violate the sealed world rules, if that's what the developers still go by >_<
I believe Bungie was using 3ds Max 8 SP2 to create the geometry and UVWs for the Halo 3 Trailer; I saw it in the first Halo 3 Documentary. If Bungie upgrades to version 9 they'll have high performance improvements... Using soft selection on thousands of vertices is calculated much faster, and would get more out of the already hasty schedule. Microsoft better have invested in their best game studio!
And I'm interested in those new water shaders... There's a lot of things I tend to wonder as an almost intermediate 3ds Max user... so let me ask, Bungie. I was wondering if you use reactor physics for water. I know you can bind a plane to the water space warp and simulate it with rigid bodies, but, in a basic sense, does the water geometry deformations (actual animated displaced ripples, or perhaps random noise) come from a shader or tag? Or does the deformations export from reactor physics? Just wondering. It's an interesting question to me. I know 3ds Max is used to model the binary space partitions, and that scene vertex and face coordinates are exported, but are reactor physics used for water? Or is water simulated by a perhaps a hard-coded function or program loop in the game's rendering engine? Just wondering; I don't mind if there's not time to answer.
Anyway though, Bungie has done a great job. Maybe this time players won't be able to pass the player clips that are supposed to have collision flags applied. I have created a few maps for Halo Custom Edition, and a few animated scenes in 3ds Max (walkthroughs, design visualizations, scenes), so I know it can be difficult at times. I'm a senior in high school as of this post, but I plan on someday becoming a level designer too. The first thing I'll do when I play Halo 3 is look at those shaders in the campaign and multiplayer modes. I want to see the bump maps, the refractions in the water, and everything else. They'll probably get me killed many times, but I know they'll be almost more impressive than the gameplay itself. Basically, I know the visuals will be nice ^_^