This a dev map of an idea for a Left 4 Dead ‘movie’ I’m doodling with. A movie as defined in L4D terms is simply a number of levels loosely tied together with a fitting climax at the end of a horde or three of infected (they’re not undead so zombies isn’t a great term although technically it does work by general definition).
Anyway here’s a video of a rough draft. I’m still working on the parking garage which will be the new ending with an appropriate crescendo moment. I ran into a limitation of Source engine (yet again) and now I have to model a lot of it as props rather than as brush work. Which means I have to beat my head against XSI (I’m a Studio Max / Lightwave 3d modeler ever since Studio 4d for DOS and the Video Toaster 1.0).  I’ve used a lot of other 3d apps, Silver, Sculpt 4D, Imagine, Maya but I never did like SoftImage or Soft ih mawghj as seems to be the l33t way to pronounce it. I didn’t know it was french based (sacasm alert) so I’m not familiar with it. It took me a couple of hours to get a wall with pillers, openings and slants modeled and textured in it as a result and then another hour and a half to get it compiled and in game because there is a shit load of misleading and simply wrong information out there on the compiling process. But eventually I got it working and now that I’ve worked out the process the next one might take 5 minutes to compile and get in game.
Why you ask am I forcing myself to use XSI instead of my beloved Max when there are perfectly good export tools for Max that are every bit as good as the so called official mod tool? Simple, learning new things stimulates the growth of neurons in your brain and these new neurons can take over when the old ancient ones are beginning to fail.  Alhzheimer’s scares me. 
Click the video above after it starts to play and you can go to the actual youtube site and watch it in hd as well.
