The whole team has been involved in pretty intensive polishing and testing in preparation for this release. This hasn’t left so much time for personal (non-Black Mesa) projects, which is why things have gone somewhat quiet around here.

Below is the official statement released by Carlos Montero (Project Lead) on our forums:

We’re freaking out over here! It is so exciting to share this news with you!

You can now Download the Black Mesa Soundtrack, courtesy of our very own Joel Nielsen, at the very generous price of whatever you want! Enjoy and share!
In the near future you’ll see our Website, Wiki and Forums all taken down temporarily for renovations.
On September 14th you will see the first release of Black Mesa! This will include our re-envisioning of Half-Life all the way up to Lambda Core. We believe this is a great way to provide a complete-feeling 8-10 hour experience with a solid ending, make our fans happy and help us make the best overall game possible.

We are still working hard on Xen and BMDM, but instead of making you wait we are giving you Black Mesa as soon as it’s ready! We’re doing our best to help bring the immense vision of this project into reality, and we are very excited for what the future brings!

High-Fives Yo,
Carlos Montero – Project Leader

As before, if anyone makes anything cool using this, I’d love to see your work! Just drop me an email or post a link in the comments.

The rose tutorial is coming later today, sometime this evening, I promise!

As such, these qualities in the game have spurred the photographer in me to feel compelled to record these sights in screen shots.  I set about tweaking the game in accordance with numerous guides available around the net to squeeze the most I could out of the game and into these screenshots. Once I felt I’d pulled as much potential out of the engine as possible, (with my game remaining playable), I set about taking my screenshots as I played and explored. These are mostly for my own amusement, but I have also decided to share them here.

I may post any more shots I take during my play. And I am forcing myself away from it today in the hopes of finishing the rose tutorial which feels long overdue at this stage. There’s plenty more shots to see if you click through.

There’s the link ^^ I hope I’ll have some other similar articles done soon. Oh, and if anyone makes anything cool using this, I’d love to see your work! Just drop me an email or post a link in the comments.

On the flip side. That cart wheel makes a little more sense now.

So here is the update! I spent the last week working like mad on all the new foliage pieces I’ve added. The largest part of the work is visible behind the railings, but when you compare these shots with the last lot you can also see just how much I have done to the front area too. Nearly every asset has got another pass of love. Most of this work was done to bring a greater sense of unity to my colour pallet, I felt things contrasted a bit too much before. A lot of props before were also very monochrome as I had pointed out to me, so this was a chance to remedy that too.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I think it’s a stronger piece for the extra work, let’s hope you do too. There’s some high-resolution stills after the break as before. I’ll wait and see what sort of reaction this update gets, make any suggested changes and then I’ll set to work on a portfolio page for it.

Up first is a set of tree bits, a couple of stumps and a log. They all share a 512*512 map, diffuse normal specular and gloss, and come in at 256, 966 and 646 triangles respectively (left to right). Click through to see some wip/breakdown shots.

Marmoset render of the lowpoly textured Tree Bits

Wireframe shot of the lowpoly tree bits

The highpoly sculpts in Mudbox

The hand painted texture for the tree bits.

These were a real challenge to get to a stage I was happy with, I spent a lot of time at each step of the process testing new ideas and really pushing my workflow. The complex organic shapes were the first time I’ve ever needed to do any serious re-topology work. So far most of my stuff has been fairly geometric which lends itself to very quick low poly modelling. The flowing organic shapes of these pieces meant I had to employ some extra steps to my usual workflow to capture their from properly. In my University work I briefly used a handy max script called Max Retopo, it’s a free to download tool that helps with the retopology process by simply snapping the vertices of your lowpoly mesh to the surface of your highpoly as you drag them around inside Max. I found it worked best when first constructing a roughly accurate lowpoly mesh around the highpoly, and then activating the script to do the final positioning. you can grab Max Retopo for yourself here.