The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Developer Blog and Terrain Video

A full 93 seconds of rendered terrain in Borgovia and some words from senior engine coder Tamás is what’s in store for you in this new developer blog over at the official Neocore Games website.  This one’s shaping up well:

On to the snippet:

When the level designers create a new map (and all the necessary elements and textures are implemented), Tamás, our senior engine coder sets the suitable lighting and atmosphere. Depending on the producer’s directions it could be day or night on the map, and even foggy and cloudy or sunny and bright. Tamás follows the instructions and his own imagination and sets the colour and the direction of the sunlight and the rate of the thickness of the clouds. He also adds the point lights to the lamps and renders the lightmaps with the Autodesk Beast. After these steps the resolution shows what kinds of other refinements are necessary (so he moves the sliders or removes the lamps with the point lights until it looks realistic). And still he has to consider some other important factors as well:

– he can’t add more than one point light to any reflecting surfaces (the result usually looks weird)
– the more average-looking parts of the terrain should rather stay in darkness
– he should not burn out the colours
– generally the composition of the colours is very important; some intensive yellow toning fits very well to the blue colours, for example.
– …and there are plenty other details he must take into consideration to achieve the perfect resolution.

So as the person who is the most familiar with our in-game engine, Tamás presents some ready-made levels. These are templates for the artists at Neocore how they have to set the lighting and the atmosphere on other further terrains.