INTERCHANGE
INTERIOR & 3D PERSPECTIVE
re3mrInterchangeMap.png ~ 30 mb
Right-click the link & press “save link as” to save this map on your Pc.
Right-click the link & press “save link as” to save this map on your PC.
These people helped me in a significant way with this map
MUHAWI • RAKTHEGOOSE • SPEEDPRIEST • ALLHOST.IO
BATTLESTATE GAMES
PSD
With the PSD you can edit the overlay to your liking. Some people make translations or callout-maps to use with their friends for example. I try to keep the PSDs somewhat organized so it should be easy to edit. Just read -> this disclaimer first.
CREATION OF THE INTERCHANGE COMMUNITY 3D MAP
IT TOOK SIX MONTHS TO COMPLETE
The Interchange map project took nearly 6 months to complete. However! That does not mean I spent every waking hour working on it for 6 months. I tried to work on it for at least one hour every day and I took some breaks to work on other stuff & deal with real life responsibilities. It took about 6 months to complete it from the time I decided to start making it. That’s what I am trying to say 🙂
THANKS TO BSG FOR LETTING ME USE THEIR TERRAIN
A few factors helped speed up the process greatly – while working on my previous project for the updated Shoreline map I realized that my maps accuracy would benefit greatly from proper terrain information. “Eyeing” height differences accurately for terrain is near impossible and I think that my older maps accuracy suffered because of it.
So I decided to reach out to BSG & ask if it would be OK for me to use their original terrain mesh without their textures for my maps. In short it would be OK just as long as I wasnt going to sell the mesh or something. So a huge thanks to BSG for letting me include that in my projects.
TO SPEEDPRIEST FOR PROVIDING REFERENCE
SPEEDPRIEST has a method of preparing the game level environment so that its content is instanced properly and have viewport coloring based off of (what I assume are) average color values of the textures of the props. That way I can open it in a Blend without my computer being set on fire & then I can adapt it (like remove rooftops to see the interiors). When I am done I render out these amazing reference images that I can work with for the whole process. Those are the background images you can see in my Youtube videos while I am working on something.
Without his reference I would have probably used BSG’s official map of the mall as a top-down reference but I would have had to rely on “manually” running around in-game documenting where and what props are located in each room and then tried to place the models based off of that. As you can imagine having Speeds reference is a huge time saver that results in my maps being a lot more accurate.
So a huge thanks to SPEEDPRIEST for setting that up for me!
TO MUHAWI & RAKTHEGOOSE FOR INFO GATHERING
I often have problems with gathering niche information such as “What lights are turned on during night time?” “What lights turn on after flipping the switch in the power station?” “What are some special things about this map that maybe I should take note of?”
Muhawi & Goose helped me figure stuff like that out multiple times & aside from that they give great feedback since they have deep knowledge of the game. So a huge thanks to them for helping out!
1461 UNIQUE PROPS MADE FOR THIS PROJECT
I made 1461 unique props for Interchange with low poly in mind since I knew that it would be viewed from quite some distance away and that there would be thousands of these props in the scene at the same time. I also used a lot of assets from my assetlibrary that I have built over time from making my different 3D maps. I divided the project up into different view layers so that it would be easier to work with in the viewport and between all of the view layers there are around 32’000 manually placed props total.
OPTIMIZATION
This is a bit more technical but in order to be able to work with such a huge project with tens of thousands of objects, trees and materials on a PC that is OK but not amazing (16 GB RAM, RTX 3060) I need to keep optimization and organization in mind throughout the entire project. All of the objects in the scene are instanced. That means that, for example, the two large exterior towers appear as two seperate tower models but it’s actually just one model that has been instanced so that they share the same mesh data. To Blender, the 3D software I use for this, it’s being treated as if it’s just one object. This lowers memory usage, results in faster rendering and as you can imagine it results in great scalability for huge scenes like this.
I have the same approach to materials. I try to keep them as few as possible & have many objects share the same one. All of the generic props I made share the same “MT_Prop” material for example. I limit the amount of textures I use & when I use them I only use low res textures that are tileable. Basically I only use them where I think it adds a lot to the overall composition & does not negatively impact how legible the map is.
AND ORGANIZATION
Each floor of the mall is put into its own respective collection-folders and all of the assets within them are divided into sub-collections. The assets within those are instanced assets that come from my asset library that have a naming convention that makes them easy to search for when I need them.
Each respetive main floor collection is also seperated into it’s own View layer. Those view layers tell Blender what to display in the viewport. They all contain the same collections but those collections can have different settings in terms of if they are enabled or not.
So if I select my Garage view layer it will disable all collections except those that are related to the Garage view. Doing all this keeps the viewport snappy and I never lose track of where things are. It also means that I can very easily render out the different floors one by one. If I need to make adjustments later I just need to select the View layer & do a render region on the area that I fixed. The render takes 5 seconds and I can then overlay the resulting image as a layer in Photoshop.
TREE PLACEMENT WITH GEO-SCATTER
To place the trees and other nature related assets I used an addon called Geo-scatter. It’s a comes with a vast suite of tools that assist in scattering all sorts of props but I wanted to mention the addon because of this amazing optimization feature – the “Display as”-functionality.
Enabling this for the selected scatter-system will replace all of the instanced props in that system with the method you choose. I use “single point” because that basically makes it weightless for Blender. It means I can mask out where the trees should be in the viewport very easily while the viewport is still nice and snappy. Every single point represents where a tree will show up.
When swapping to the “rendered” viewport I can see the result of how I masked out the tree placement, as you can see in the images below.
When I am satisfied with the placement and I am done working with the different scatter-systems I can easily turn off their viewport visibility in the addon so that it will have no impact whatsoever when working on other stuff in the same scene.
MORE DETAILED INFORMATION ON MY PATREON
I went into a lot more technical detail about how I made certain things on my Patreon. Most of my posts over there are readable for free, you just need to be a member to view it. If you want to subscribe it’s mostly to support me as an artist & future mapping projects.