So at the start of Half-Life: Blue Shift there's this really cool train crash:
I had a discussion about this earlier in a gamedev server where we were trying to determine if this was an animated model, or if it was done entirely in the engine with brush entities. Turns out there's no models for the sequence to suggest the former, so I decompiled the map to check it out and...
I've hidden some entities for clarity, but as you can see the entirety of that fucking beautiful near 360 flip the train does, with all the barrels and crates flying everywhere, was manually figured out by some level designer at Gearbox.
Wonderful!
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pgp: E301 28DF E688 3D96 6197
F4A1 A28B 8D77 097A 9C21
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in reply to @iiboharz's post:
I really lamented it when that era of game engines ended, I loved making animated stuff and complex levels but then a generation or two later you needed to use external programs to make 3D models to import as static meshes to make anything like a truck to move around, I kinda just lost interest at that point...
I remember reading somewhere that this particular segment actually took the majority of Blue Shift's entire dev cycle to make. It's definitely the most impressive setpiece in the expansion.
It's a shame how much level design workflows these days just make stuff like this harder. So many things have to be pulled out to dedicated art tools that don't let you design assets in situ.