My 3D EQ Fan-art

[toddfx]

Thanks guys, glad you're digging the map stuff so far. I have a full week of vacation coming up, so I hope to get quite a lot of work done on this. I'm really eager to get into the animation phase, but need to finish up a few more zones before I do that.

Another big hurdle I need to get over is figuring out how to create a whole world full of trees, efficiently. Scattering them over the surface using a particle system is what I am doing now, which works, but something about it is crashing the scene at times. Plus the tree models i'm currently using kind of look like crap.. So my steps for moving forward will be:

01) Finish some zones such as: Halas, Lavastorm, Freeport, most of Odus, and the southern shore of Antonica.
02) Create new tree system, including other scattered details such as stones and smaller shrubs.
03) Start animating camera flythroughs, and edit together a grayscale previz timed to the music (the remastered EQ theme).
04) Render. This is the really scary part. I have access to my workplace's 50 blade render farm, but I know there are a few other projects coming up that will obviously take precedence on the render farm. So hopefully I can manage to get all the camera fly-throughs rendered by like...mid spring [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Originally Posted by utenan [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

It's quite amazing to have played eq for so long, and to be so familiar with the world, but never being able to see it like this....I am just blown away. I can't wait to see more!

That's a big part of why I love to do stuff like this! Classic EverQuest is incredibly unique as it rides a fine line of giving you enough to play, with but still lets your imagination fill in many of the blanks. You become so vividly familiar with the world as it exists in the game, yet it still leaves so much open to let your imagination extrapolate upon. This creates an incredibly rich source of inspiration for any type of creative endeavor.

Very few modern games really give that same kind of opportunity. With such graphic & detail oriented engines, and increasingly lazy/spoiled players, games today are expected to fully replace your imagination, not feed it. I believe classic EQ is still so immersive today because it at least partially, in the words of Sheldon Cooper, "runs on the world's most powerful graphics chip: imagination." (he was refering to Zork, but still)

Originally Posted by Kylenorr [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I didn't want to read through all 16 pages of comments, is there anywhere that you have all of your work in one place to check out?

There isn't anything else here, actually. The only update since my original post was just the one on Page 15. But I do have some other medieval inspired works on my site: toddkumpf.com under the Personal gallery section.