First Steps in Source

Half-life 2 is one of my favourite games, there is just something about the look and feel of the landscapes, the atmosphere and the character models that feels right and I've been keen to try it for archaeological visualisation for a while.

However, the brush based modelling used by Half-life makes use of terrain models derived from greyscale heightmaps problematic. Inspired by discovery of Dan Pichbeck's excellent Chineseroom and his AHRC funded Half-life 2 mods Dear Esther and Korsakovia I felt it was time to grapple with the problem again.  A little bit of searching turned up a really useful tutorial at Interlopers.net and a link to DispGen, a tool for deriving Half-life brush-based displacement maps from greyscale heightmaps.  Initial results are promising, and it proved relatively easy to get our Laxton Castle terrain model into Hammer and on into Half-life 2.  Scaling is a bit of a problem, solved for now by using an NPC as a rough scale.  Early days, but the potential for using Half-life for visualisations based on real terrain is quite exciting...