Half-Life 2HD (My own little 'remaster' of my favorite game)
Since joining the unemployment club earlier this year, I wanted to keep myself busy with something constructive, so I started 'remastering' Half-Life 2. Basically, porting it over to Mapbase to make use of improvements like dynamic RTT shadows, parallax corrected cubemaps, PBR materials (for the parallax occlusion mapping) improved lighting, higher quality baked shadows, vertex lighting (and overall better lighting) on all static props, texture shadows, projected texture shadows (env_projectedtexture), etc. I've also been creating a lot of custom models to add vanilla friendly details to the world like converting 2D brush textures to 3D models, 3D grass (using $treesway), more foliage models, etc. Improving the original models (like missing faces, stretched UV's, softer edges) or sometimes creating the models from scratch (like the trees or gutters). Creating/generating tons of normal maps for textures and splitting textures into different surface properties (so shooting windows doesn't look like shooting concrete). Creating custom skybox models to have more consistent skyboxes between maps, improving brushwork details, etc. There's probably a lot more I am not mentioning.
I am currently focusing on the chapter Anti-Citizen One but making improvements across the board. In this showcase I will feature only d3_c17_03 for now as it's my main 'showcase map'. You'll see some changes to the map: this is more of a technical choice rather than an artistic choice because I am constantly reaching engine limits. I am also learning the more I work on this project, so this is basically still a work in progress. Hopefully in a few weeks I'll be able to share more or upload a video.
